Re: Re-Marketing Ada (was "With and use")

["Chad R. Meiners" <crmeiners@hotmail.com>]

"Marin David Condic" <nobody@noplace.com> wrote in message
news:3FB8B9BC.5040505@noplace.com...
> I think they *know* about it, but they are not much interested in
> teaching a language that appears to be on the decline if not exactly
> "dead". They want to be able to prepare students for the kinds of things
> they'll likely see when they get out in industry and don't want to teach
> something that might be perceived as of purely academic interest with no
> practical use.

Well first of all the point of a computer science degree is not to prepare
you for industry.  If you want to be prep'ed for industrial use, go to a
technical college, it will suffice.  Now I am not saying that universities
do not prepare you for industry, but I am saying that university programs
have (and should have) concerns other than satisfying the demands of
industry.  In short, the point of a university degree is to develop your
mind; teaching you a trade is secondary.  I will admit that it is easy to
find professors that have lost touch with this objective.  Furthermore, I
will admit that collaboration between universities and industry can have a
very positive effect.  However, the fact remains that the stated goals of
universities are to discover truth and to develop minds.  (Can you tell that
I have had this argument before ;-)

That being said, I agree that the main reason computer science faculty
resist teaching Ada is that they believe it to be a dying language.
However, I believe that we have a good sellable argument for the language
with the following pedagogical reasons:  (This is off the top of my head.
Please feel free to add more to the list.)

1. Ada is subsetable.  Initial student will start out with a small but
workable subset of Ada.  As the student grows and develops so can the subset
of Ada.  When teaching new concepts (such as OO programming, or
multi-tasking programs) new features within Ada can be introduced and added
to the subset.

2. Ada compilers produce helpful and informative compile errors.  Ergo, it
is easier to spot and correct misunderstandings about programming and
software development and such detection usually happens earlier.

3. Ada is versatile.   Ada contains enough features to properly facilitate
any type of computer science course.

4. Ada is designed via the method of least surprise.  This allows the
professors to concentrate on programming issues as opposed to programming
language issues.

The problem is to convince the professors that the above benefits overweight
the benefits of using old lecture note about a language that they already
know.

Note that I don't think that universities should not teach C/C++ or any
other languages.  They should of course offer them as programming language
courses.  But also as has been expressed many times before in this
newsgroup, learning a second language is not nearly as difficult as learning
the first one.   Learning Ada as a first language really helps students
absorb programming concepts faster.  (These are my observations; I wish we
could do a study on this since such a conclusion would be wonderful press
for Ada ;-)