Re: Mike Feldman, meet Archie

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <1993Mar8.132419.21952@westminster.ac.uk> priestm@westminster.ac.uk (Mark Priestley) writes:
>
>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".
>
Well, you make some good points. I suggest, though, that you ask your friends
at the following UK universities why they don't think Ada is dead. In all
these schools, Ada is being taught as the entry-level language and, as
far as I can tell, propagated through the curriculum. Most of these places,
by the way, have adopted this "dead language" recently, after the C++
craze got started, so they're not just hanging onto something out
of sheer inertia:

Cranfield Institute of Technology, United Kingdom
Portsmouth Polytechnic, United Kingdom
University of Aston, United Kingdom
University of Bradford, United Kingdom
University of Lancaster, United Kingdom
University of Liverpool, United Kingdom
University of Paisley, United Kingdom
University of Stafford, United Kingdom
University of Wales, Aberystwyth, United Kingdom
University of York, United Kingdom

As far as I can tell, there is a distinct trend _toward_ Ada in the UK.
(Undoubtedly there are other trends away from Pascal too.)

Two new first-year texts have just appeared from UK authors: one is by
Culwin and I don't recall the author of the other. Clearly these authors,
and their publishers, seem to have the heretical notion that Ada is alive :-)

I believe, as do many other teachers, that one's first language influences
one's thinking forever. This holds for natural as well as computer languages.
Ada should certainly not be the only one learned by students, but many of
us believe it should be the first. Even in the UK, apparently...

Let's talk a bit about this "investment" to move to Ada. Are you referring
to universities' perceived investment in compilers? Have you checked the
prices lately? Are you referring to mental investment? Are you claiming
that the mental investment to move from, say, Pascal, to ML or C++ is
lower? I find that difficult to believe.

As far as Ada's "death" is concerned, we'll have to see where it is in
five years or so. Obviously nobody has a pure, clear crystal ball. But
we can all make predictions. Mine is that Ada will, over the long run,
be seen to have "staying power" and may outlast some of the more faddish
things as people become disillusioned with the instability of the fads.
Ada's stability and conservative "waterfall model" design may be thought
of as stodgy by many of us impatient computer tekkies, but I'll stick 
out my neck and speculate that the conservativeness and accompanying
portability will be eventually seen as a distinct advantage.

Cheers all -

Mike Feldman

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Michael B. Feldman
co-chair, SIGAda Education Committee

Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052 USA
(202) 994-5253 (voice)
(202) 994-5296 (fax)
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)

"The most important thing is to be sincere, 
and once you've learned how to fake that, you've got it made." 
-- old show-business adage
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