Re: Languages don't matter. A mathematical refutation

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

> We have to look at the possible causes.   What changed?

At some point in time programming was introduced as a subject in the schools that precede university. You know, just as today some people are trying to push programming to nursery schools. The level (and therefore age) when programming is first introduced becomes lower and lower with time and this means that at the university level, as years go by, you can expect students to have higher and higher initial programming experience. Years ago a typical student entered university with zero programming experience and now this initial experience is significantly higher, thus allowing students to be more successful with exercises if the exercises do not change. And since such changes in the scholar system are introduced in a step-wise manner, you can also expect that at some particular time in the past the batch of new students had a step-wise more experience at the entry.

Unless you prove that this had no influence on the results in question, I refute the whole of your mathematical proof.

> This demonstration was just for fun

Sure. Preaching to the choir is always fun. ;-)

But more seriously, it would be interesting to flip languages every year and see whether the advantages of Ada hold in terms of better results. Or run two classes in parallel (with random assignments of students to each class) and compare results over the years.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.msobczak.com * http://www.inspirel.com