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=0.8 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_50,LOTS_OF_MONEY autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 8 May 92 05:21:04 GMT From: news.byu.edu!eff!world!srctran@gatech.edu (Gregory Aharonian) Subject: Re: Ada in CS1/CS2 Courses: One More Chance at Correction Message-ID: List-Id: 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 :-)