From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.0 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_40 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: Mon, 2 Aug 93 17:12:56 MDT From: Colin James 0621 Subject: Learning Ada as a first language, not C Message-ID: <9308021712.aa25075@dsc.blm.gov> List-Id: 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 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.