Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

["Jeffrey D. Cherry" <jdcherry@utech.net>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> If the profs who teach Ada would refer their students here and to some of the
> more useful web sites like Adapower, this would help because they would get
> exposed to these sorts of uses of Ada. We can always do our part by politely
> helping out the students when we can.

As a part-time instructor, I teach Ada (and other languages) at the local 
community college for both CS1 and CS2 courses.  My syllabus for each of 
the Ada courses strongly recommends that students check out Ada resources 
on the Internet, starting with AdaPower and CLA.  The one thing I restrict 
students from doing is asking for help on their homework in CLA.  That's 
my job.  The other computer science instructor has a similar policy and
even assigns homework requiring students to summarize a recent Internet 
article, discussion thread, etc. 

Although students loathe to do any more reading than the minimum, 
occasionally, there is the motivated student that asks a question about 
some discussion on CLA.  I've also found certain CLA discussions to
be quite interesting and posed the original query to my class in order
to generate a discussion of "real-world" problems.  I have demonstrated
GtkAda applications to show students that GUI applications can be built 
with Ada.  I have also shown how a Java application can be built using 
Ada rather than Java (using JGNAT of course).  Although my Ada students
were happy to hear that they don't have to learn Java to create Java
apps, my Java students were rather disappointed.

I suspect that other instructors, throughout the world, have similar
practices that encourage students to explore the resources of the 
Internet and participate in discussion groups.  If you fail to notice
a large contingent of student participation on CLA, it's not 
necessarily due to the lack of encouragement by their instructors.

Personally, I believe that it is more important to teach students good
software engineering principles and practices than to sing the praises 
of any one particular programming language.  I try to instill in my
students that a programming language is merely a tool used to express 
their design in a form that a stupid machine can understand.  At the
end of each of my CS1 courses, I always devote a lecture hour to 
persuading students to learn another programming language, and then 
another, and another, ....  I do this because a good engineer will 
learn about all the available tools and then apply proper engineering
criteria to select the right tool for the job at hand.  Ada, by 
design, is one of the best tools for expressing a software design 
in the vast majority of real-world applications.

Perhaps the increased interest in Ada is due to all the diligent teachers 
who have taught their students well.  Perhaps those students have now 
graduated and are choosing Ada after performing a tradeoff analysis 
with other programming languages.  Perhaps these well educated graduates
are dismissing the marketing group's recommendation for a programming
language because it's based on personal bias, advertising hype, perceived 
popularity, or the misperception that a certain programming language will
somehow guarantee an increased market share.  Perhaps these graduates are
negating management pressure to use one language by showing that it is
more cost effective to select a programming language based on technical 
merits of the language in light of the specific problem and accounting for 
all phases of the resulting product's useful life.  

I may be taking this a little too personally since I'm an instructor.  I
may be a little too sensitive to comments about instructors not doing 
enough with regard to teaching a programming language.  If so, then I 
apologize for my little tirade and I appreciate your tolerance of my
rankings.  In any case, thanks for allowing me to vent; I feel better.

-- 
Regards,
Jeffrey D. Cherry
Senior IV&V Analyst
Logicon Operations and Services
Logicon Inc.
a Northrop Grumman company