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=-0.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 11232c,59ec73856b699922 X-Google-Attributes: gid11232c,public X-Google-Thread: fdb77,5f529c91be2ac930 X-Google-Attributes: gidfdb77,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,583275b6950bf4e6 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1108a1,59ec73856b699922 X-Google-Attributes: gid1108a1,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-05-02 10:11:33 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!cyclone.bc.net!sjc70.webusenet.com!news.webusenet.com!newsfeed2.earthlink.net!newsfeed.earthlink.net!stamper.news.pas.earthlink.net!stamper.news.atl.earthlink.net!harp.news.atl.earthlink.net!not-for-mail From: Richard Riehle Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.advocacy,comp.object,comp.lang.ada,misc.misc Subject: Re: the Ada mandate, and why it collapsed and died (was): 64 bit addressing and OOP Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 10:10:49 -0700 Organization: AdaWorks Software Engineering Message-ID: <3EB2A698.978A3A0F@adaworks.com> References: <9fa75d42.0304300412.3c9f8157@posting.google.com> <98BC68183770643E.43B22CFE5F4D5EFD.5566989BE627964B@lp.airnews.net> <9fa75d42.0305010645.7a5572ed@posting.google.com> <3EB1C603.7788E194@adaworks.com> <9fa75d42.0305020520.20859901@posting.google.com> Reply-To: richard@adaworks.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 41.b2.41.e1 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Server-Date: 2 May 2003 17:11:32 GMT X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.java.advocacy:63056 comp.object:62568 comp.lang.ada:36873 misc.misc:13907 Date: 2003-05-02T17:11:32+00:00 List-Id: soft-eng wrote: > There weren't any Ada projects at that time to have experience in! > Believe it or not, that's how teaching of new languages has to start, > particularly of languages like Ada with no existing industrial base. > > But you are still insisting on arguing by insult, which I have little > interest in because it merely shows to me you have nothing valid to say. OK. Not intending to insult you. My point was that there was a lot of Ada teaching going on by people with little experience in it. You were not the only one, and you may have been better than most. This was also true of C++ in the beginning, so it is not unique to Ada. And you are probably correct that any new technology with a minimal installed base will take time for those teaching it to get up to speed. Today, there is such a large number of successful Ada projects that we would hope the quality of teaching it would be better. However, for both C++ and Ada (and probably other languages) I still see people teaching them who have not written any serious programs, have not stretched themselves in their learning how to make the languages work well for real programming. When Ada was first introduced, there were a lot of ideas that were foreign to the programming community as a whole. The most important of these, one that is still not understood by a lot of educators, is the importance of the visibility rules. This is one of Ada's most unique and powerful features, one that lends itself to taking an engineering view of the software process, but those teaching Ada (and many who are using it) miss out on valuable opportunities by overlooking it. Many of the early Ada trainers totally missed the point with regard to this capability. Many still do. Richard Riehle