Re: Mike Feldman, meet Archie

[priestm@westminster.ac.uk (Mark Priestley)]

In article <1993Mar6.033256.18621@seas.gwu.edu> mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:

   This is increasingly seen to be a canard. I have met many hundreds of
   academics in the last few years as an active Ada teacher and SIGAda
   education co-chair. I hear _over and over_ that the problems with Ada
   in recent years in breaking into academia are mostly _not_ political-
   correctness problems, but (in no particular order)

   - ignorance about Ada's accomplishments and possibilities;
   - perceived tremendous cost of compilers;
   - lack of curriculum-oriented textbooks.

There is another, more fundamental reason in my opinion: Ada is widely regarded
as a dead language, both by students and many faculty members, and as a result,
although the technical merits of the language might be well-understood,
no-one's prepared to make the significant investment that changing to Ada would
represent.  By "dead language" I mean an ill-assorted collection of
observations, including: "there are very few jobs in Ada"; "why don't Borland
have an Ada compiler?"; "why is Ada introducing tagged types, instead ofjoining
the OO mainstream?" As a colleague said: "it's like teaching Latin instead of
French, on the grounds that Latin's got more grammmar".

-- 
Mark Priestley      	    	    Email:  	M.Priestley@uk.ac.westminster
School of Computer Science ...
University of Westminster
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