From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,8623fab5750cd6aa X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsread.com!newsstand.newsread.com!POSTED.monger.newsread.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Ada in colleges and universities. From: "Peter C. Chapin" References: Organization: Kelsey Mountain Software Message-ID: User-Agent: Xnews/5.04.25 Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 17:11:30 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 216.114.169.202 X-Complaints-To: Abuse Role , We Care X-Trace: monger.newsread.com 1086628290 216.114.169.202 (Mon, 07 Jun 2004 13:11:30 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 13:11:30 EDT Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1199 Date: 2004-06-07T17:11:30+00:00 List-Id: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" 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