Re: Why is Ada a good choice for an ambitious beginner to programming

["David Wright" <davidw@uq.net.au>]

"Richard Riehle" <richard@adaworks.com> wrote in
message news:3E1E353A.3EC76758@adaworks.com...
: "John R. Strohm" wrote:
:
: > MIT uses Scheme in the first-semester freshman
programming course.  See
: > "Structure and Interpretation of Computer
Programs", by Abelson and Sussman.
:
: UC Cal at Berkeley was doing the same for a while.
Have not checked recently
: to see if they still are.
:
: The important idea here is that any respectable
computer science program should
: ensure that students understand both imperative and
functional programming.
: Scheme,
: Haskell, ML, or some other functional language will
do just fine for the
: functional
: language.  Ada is probably a good choice for the
imperative language.
:
: Even so, every computer science program should have a
class in comparative
: programming languages so students get a strong whiff
of Smalltalk, Ada, LISP,
: C++, Eiffel, and various other languages.
:
: Richard Riehle

It was with enormous pleasure that I read this post.
The notion of comparative language instruction was
precisely my raw newbie intuition in my message here of
23rd December, 02 ; the subsequent lack of affirmation
had me doubting my sanity and, even worse, my common
sense!

Obviously, the devil is in the detail as to timing,
scope and sequence; an *in-depth* comparative analysis
would clearly be futile for a complete beginner,
perhaps even a 'false beginner'. However, there must be
ways of usefully conveying comparative information
early, before a beginner (e.g., me!) rushes in to
follow the C, C++ or Java crowd and either gets turned
off with frustration or hyper-committed and blinkered
to any other worthwhile paradigm or language.

It seems to me that even the notion of examining
different programming paradigms at an "entry" or
"beginner" level is anathema or at least a novel idea.
For example, Richard Riehle properly distinguishes
between imperative and functional languages. Yet
neither the MS Computer Dictionary nor Prentice Halls
Dictionary of Computing contains an entry for
'imperative'. And even after reading several
introduction to programming texts, e.g. Perry, Wang,
Dale, Hennefeld, I am none-the-wiser as to the precise
meaning of this elementary term and must surmise that
it is synonymous with 'structural' and subsumes
languages such as Basic, Pascal, Ada, and C.

With the self-teaching hobbyist and non-tertiary
inclined in mind, would it really be such an invidious
task for someone to condescend to write a "Comparative
Programming Paradigms and Languages" for (Inquisitive)
Dummies? <8-))

Rhetorically yours
David Wright