Ada in colleges and universities.

["Peter C. Chapin" <pchapin@sover.net>]

"Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca> wrote in news:iEZwc.6943
$8k4.235178@news20.bellglobal.com:

> Sounds like universities suffer from the chicken and egg
> problem.

In the late 1980's we taught Ada at Vermont Technical College (in the 
computer engineering technology classes) as the student's first exposure 
to programming. The language was then used in several other classes, 
including one low level interfacing class. The idea was that Ada would 
help teach the students good programming habits and help them develop a 
sense about how programs should be structured and organized. Of course 
such topics could be introduced using any language, but Ada put the ideas 
in the student's faces more and, hopefully, helped them to learn those 
ideas better.

This was all fine, but the reality was that a huge majority of third party 
programs the students had to read or modify were written in C. Also most 
text books contained C examples. It soon became clear that we were not 
properly preparing our students for the real world unless we taught them 
C. One obvious solution would be to teach both. Perhaps introduce them to 
programming using the discipline of Ada and then teach them C later with 
the hope that they would be better C programmers for their Ada background. 
Alas, there is only so much time in any curriculum. It was decided that C 
had to be in the program and that there wasn't enough time for both Ada 
and C. Thus Ada was dropped.

Today we do C and then C++. However, since C++ is a rough superset of C, 
the transition to it is relatively painless and efficient. Ada has not 
been in our program since about 1990 or so.

That's our story.

Peter