Re: Emb.Sys.Prog survey shows Ada being used negligibly

[seas.gwu.edu!mfeldman@uunet.uu.net (Michael Feldman)]

In article <1993May25.211841.2711@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com> shanks@saifr00.c
fsat.honeywell.com (Mark Shanks) writes:
>
[other stuff deleted]

>... The SW language being taught
>at any of the Academies has about as much impact on a prospective
>student's decision to go there as their horoscope sign. And since
>the applications outnumber vacancies by a couple orders of
>magnitude, the Academies have little reason to worry about the
>pools of prospective cadets drying up.

Nice to hear from you on this.

Take it from an 18-year member of an EECS faculty: language decisions
have a lot to do with faculty preferences and politics. These decisions
are typically made by committees; faculties fight fiercely to protect
their curriculum-designing prerogatives, and I think most of you would
prefer to keep it that way. (We all like interference from above _if_
the interference happens to be on our side...)

What I hear from colleagues in the academy faculties is that the command
structure there is somewhat tighter than in an arbitrary college, but
somewhat looser than in the infantry. Somewhere in between, in that 
huge gray area between dictatorship and pure democracy is a decision-
making process that designs a curriculum. No doubt the commandant of an
academy could dictate choices at the detail level (like the choice of
a coding language), but why on earth would he waste ammunition on that?

My friends in the academies tell me that the ignorance of, and sometimes
hostility to, Ada among students and faculty is not terribly different
in the academies than elsewhere. The same reasons are given: lousy
and overpriced tools compared to other languages, clunkiness of the
type system, irrelevance of Ada to the rest of the world. In other
words, the same half-truths we always flame at each other about,
right here on the net.

So what else is new?

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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