Re: Ada in CS1/CS2 Courses: One More Chance at Correction

Re: Ada in CS1/CS2 Courses: One More Chance at Correction

[Gregory Aharonian]

Dr. Feldman's list of colleges teaching Ada in introductory courses is
quite illuminating on the sheer incompetence of the DoD in evangelizing Ada
with the billions of Ada dollars always being tossed about.

First, this is probably an oversite, but I did not see the Naval Postgraduate
School in Monterey, and the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, on
either list of schools teaching Ada at the introductory.  I say oversite, 
because the alternative is hypocrisy.  These two schools train a lot of the
officers involved with software procurements (at the masters degree level),
and if they aren't teaching Ada from day one to their students, someone
somehwere should be fired.

Second, another oversite is Carnegie Mellon University, since I can't
believe that with all of the money that has gone into SEI, that the SEI
people couldn't walk across the street to Carnegie Mellon and convinvce
them of the superiority of Ada as a teaching language.  The same holds
true for the University of Pittsburgh.

Third, there is some Defense Computing Institute in the Washington Navy
Yard the last I heard.  I assume that they are teaching Ada, and should
be on the lists.  Otherwise, this is worth a couple of firings.

Sarcasm aside, neither lists contain any of the following schools: MIT,
Harvard, NYU, Columbia, Carnegie Mellion, Georgia Tech, Stanford, Caltech,
Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UIUC and others. These schools are where most of the
advanced computer software and hardware research in critical technologies
is going on, much funded by the DoD, and none of it in Ada, partly because
the language just isn't taught at these schools.

That Dr. Feldman could only put together a list of about 70 schools teaching
Ada should be embarassing, given the billions going into Ada and Defense 
software and the hundreds of millions going into STARS and other software
engineering projects.  That the Free Software Foundation has not been given
a million dollars to develop Ada front ends for their existing programs is
a true measure of the DoD's real disinterest in having Ada grow out of the
Defense community.  Maybe the DoD should hire the guy who sold pet rocks.

Dr. Feldman's article should be quite interesting.  I hope it includes
comments on the conflicting reports in the Mosemann studies about how Ada
has made it into the college curriculae.

Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimization
617-489-3727

(P.S. Did I mention that my directory of much of the government's software
1992 edition, is available :-)