Re: is ada dead?

["Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbryant@mail.utexas.edu>]

In article <877kxianb2.fsf@deneb.enyo.de>, "Florian Weimer"
<fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:


> I would expect that anyone with a CS degree can learn programming in
> any language in a few weeks.

You don't even need a CS degree.  I formerly worked at a big company
that tried moving people into IT to keep from having to lay them off
while hiring new IT staff at the same time.  What was immediately
visible to me (if not to management) is that almost anyone can "learn" a
language well enough to write a line of code that will compile.  The bug
jump is from there to being able to write a program that actually works
right.

Languages are ephemeral.  If I were designing a CS curriculum I would
require the students to use a different language every semester: partly
so they would be flexible when they graduated and got a job in the Real
World, partly so they wouldn't develop the One True Language mentality
that you see so often, and partly so they would learn to see beyond the
syntax to the underlying universals.

Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas