Re: Yearly Fees for Support of Compiler

[enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum)]

In article <1991May10.055918.3595@netcom.COM>, Jim Showalter writes:

    I'd be the first to agree that Ada has made inroads. On the other
    hand, Borland shipped something like half a million copies of
    Turbo C++ last year.  You do the math.

IMNSHO, you confuse quantity with quality.  The real issue is, given
half a million copies of Turbo C++, will there be a larger quantity of
quality programmers using C++ than there will be quality programmers
using Ada?  I'd say quality programmers are independent of language
used, and that programming is so incredibly difficult for many people
to get right that they may need some hand-holding to get there.  C++
lets people do useful things earlier than Ada does.  WordPerfect lets
people do useful things earlier than an SGML system does, too.  C++ is
simpler to learn and handle.  WordPerfect is thought to be simple to
learn and handle.  Even though I admire C++ a lot and hoped it had
covered more ground, it has yet to make it to the same size projects
for which Ada is used.  Even though some claim that WordPerfect can do
what they need, I don't think the choice between an SGML system and
WordPerfect for a government documents database is very hard.  (The
analogy is not to scale.)

My point is that Ada is more than a language, it's a conceptual frame-
work.  Teaching that framework with a simpler, smaller language so
programmers can get the "hands-on" experience which so many of them
seem to require seems to be the right way to go, and then migrate to
the "real thing" as the ideas that helped shape Ada can be grasped by
the students from their own experiences, rather than textbook examples
and case studies they can't relate to.

Another point is that there's going to be _hordes_ of illiterate pro-
grammers with C++ experience and no idea what they're doing.  (Same
goes for C, of course.)  Teaching the proper mind-set to such people is
going to require more than it would have taken to teach someone with no
experience the same ideas.  (My experience tells me that educators have
a lot of work to do in this area.)

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[Erik Naggum]           Professional Programmer        <enag@ifi.uio.no>
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