Re: Why is Ada NOT a good choice for a beginner to programming?

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

faust wrote:
>>it would start a silly flame war.  (Didn't Dijkstra's also say teaching
>>BASIC should require a prison sentence?  Or was that some other
>>language?  
> 
> ""The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore,
> be regarded as a criminal offense."
> Edsger Dijkstra "

I don't believe that Dijkstra had much nice to say about any
language, including the predecessor to Ada.

For my $0.02, I don't think it really matters what they start in.
It is true however, that early experience _can_ be habit forming,
but this does not necessarily mean the result is predetermined.

I think that being "self taught" can be one of the limiting
factors however. If no one ever pushed you in the direction
of Ada, you might never see the reason why it was worth the
effort. This is where you need a selling job to be done, and
on top of that, the beginner's experience needs to be smoother
than it currently is.

The sad reality is (for beginners) is that if it is hard to use,
and you see no "benefit for me" in this difficulty, then you'll
stick with what you know, or try something else.

>>One should learn *many* programming languages, if one is serious about
>>programming.  But one should not start with BASIC (or C, or assembly).
> 
> I plan to teach my 12 year old son to program.
> I am vacillating between Ada and Scheme.
> I'll probably go with Scheme since there is an excellent and powerful
> free envirnoment for it ( Dr Scheme ) 
...
> (from Basho)

Like writing a book, you must "know your audience". If I ever
attempted to teach Ada to my teen-aged daughter, her eyes would
just glaze over and she would say "sure, dad!"

Yet she was able to learn a "tich" of programming by using Qbasic
that was shipped free with Windows95 (you have to hunt for it on
the CD and install it manually). There QBasic acted as both the
run environment and the IDE for her, keeping things very simple.

She'll not likely ever become a professional, but at least she
has some concept now of how things work.

Now your response might be that I did a poor job of selling Ada
to her, and I'd have to say you were right. But how do you sell
difficult concepts to a young audience that is already numbed by
the complexity of the computer world as they initially see it?
Even we get "numbed" by it, ourselves (or I get increasingly
numbed as I age each new year ;-) )

What concerns me much more is that when she graduated from high
school, only 2 out of 260 kids announced that they were going to
persue a career in computer science/programming. I expect that
out of those 2, at least one of them will quickly want to move
into management.  Who then, over the next decade, is going to do
all the grunt work of programming? Maybe this sample is not
representative of the trend, but I find this statistical
sample rather disturbing. :-(

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg