Learning Ada as a first language, not C

Learning Ada as a first language, not C

[Colin James 0621]

  
In a recent article, "The History of Programming Languages", Dr. Dobb's
Journal, August 1993, K.N. King, a professor at Georgia State University,
writes:
  
   What should students learn as a first programming language?  Many\b
   colleges are beginning to teach C as a first language.  [[Dennis]]
   Ritchie didn't endorse this trend.  Any approach that tends to produce
   dependence on a particular language is bad, he said, suggesting that
   Scheme might be a good choice. ... [[Niklaus]] Wirth asked "Are you
   teaching a skill or [providing] general education?"  In the former
   case, he recommended Ada;  in the latter, he advised using a "simpler
   language" -- but not C.  "I view the landslide of C use in education
   as rather a calamity," he said.
  
And an interesting bit of trivia presumably attributed to William Whitaker,
who managed the development of Ada for DoD:
  
   How much code is written for DoD each day?  (Two million lines!)
  
Wirth was also quoted as follows:

   Wirth ... refrained from criticizing C, however, until the closing 
   panel, where he said that "hacking is in" and claimed that "most
   programmers enjoy working by trial and error."  Looking at Ritchie,
   who was sitting next to him, Wirth continued:  "The most important
   promoter of this trend: C."  He said that languages such as C are
   useful for bootstrapping software onto a new machine, but their
   use should be only "temporary".  Ritchie, taking these attacks
   graciously, noted that Wirth's point were "well-taken" and
   acknowledged that "it is possible to use C in a better way than
   people do."  But he also said that "one sometimes has to make
   compromises" in the real world.