Re: Ada, "Software Fantasyland," and Quick Courses

[billwolf@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe,2847,)]

From article <6660@siemens.UUCP>, by balcer@gypsy.siemens-rtl (Marc J Balcer):
> The official prerequisites for the [rather popular Ada] course included 
> only one semester of Pascal programming.  I told the students that they 
> really needed CS2 (Advanced Pascal) and Data Structures as well; I did 
> not intend to spend 3 lectures explaining what arrays, records, and pointers
> were.  Nor did I want students who thought a "big program" was
> anything over 50 lines long.  [...] Not only were many unfamilar
> with high-level languages, I had to justify structured programming!
> Strong typing was something to be defeated.  (Was I naive for making
> assumptions about their background?)

    The problem is with the prerequisites, I think.  Another poster
    (Bob Hathaway) recently said that he had no trouble with Ada, etc.,
    while posting from purdue.edu; this indicates that the people who
    are coming up from college TODAY are being properly trained in
    software engineering concepts.  The problem is that vast numbers
    of people graduated from college back in the days when hacking 
    was the dominant paradigm.  These people evidently did not absorb
    basic concepts of professionalism, such as "A professional maintains 
    membership in professional organizations such as the ACM, and must
    continuously strive to stay abreast of both the state of the science
    and the state of the technology".

    Ada cannot be taught in isolation.  Software engineering must be either
    a prerequisite or a corequisite.  Data Structures should also be a 
    prerequisite, so the students will understand what an ADT is.  

    Specify these topics as unconditionally required for admission, and
    let the Registrar do the enforcement.  This should eliminate such problems.


    Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu