From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,cec20777e0d41ea0 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-02-09 13:25:14 PST Path: supernews.google.com!sn-xit-02!supernews.com!news.tele.dk!193.190.198.17!newsfeeds.belnet.be!news.belnet.be!newsfeed1.news.nl.uu.net!sun4nl!sienna.impulse.net!azure.impulse.net!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3A846035.5A1F5E36@utech.net> Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2001 13:25:09 -0800 From: "Jeffrey D. Cherry" X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Increased Interest In Ada? References: <3A82EFA2.C8756B09@acm.org> <3A83F25C.CEB50F1D@acm.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.154.67.17 X-Trace: azure.impulse.net 981753908 195 207.154.67.17 Xref: supernews.google.com comp.lang.ada:5082 Date: 2001-02-09T13:25:09-08:00 List-Id: 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