Re: Ada for 1st year students

[John McCormick <mccormick@cs.uni.edu>]

On Oct 11, 11:20 am, "(see below)" <yaldni...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I headed a team that introduced Ada 95 as the 1st- and 2nd-years' foundation
> language at Glasgow University CS Department in 1996. That ran very well
> indeed for 10 years. In fact, it was by far the most successful course I had
> anything to do with, in nearly 30 years of teaching programming.
>
> The course we delivered followed the recommendations above very closely
> indeed, and I strongly agree with virtually everything John has said.
>
> (Ada has now been replaced by Python "because it is more fun".  I'm glad I
> retired before that happened, as I would not be able to disguise my contempt
> for the guilty parties.)
>
> --
> Bill Findlay

Your story is one I hear often when I work the ACM SIGAda booth at the
exhibit hall at SIGCSE conferences.

It never ceases to amaze me how computer science educators want to use
bleeding edge technology in the beginning courses.  These are the
students who require the most stabilty in a programming language.
When Java first burst upon the educational scene, my Department voted
to replace our successful Ada based course with a Java one.  If I had
been old enough to retire, I might be golfing with you today.  After 5
years, the faculty teaching the upper level courses staged a revolt.
Their students' ability to write code (mostly in C) for their projects
had fallen tremendously from the days when we used Ada in the
beginning courses.  We switched back to Ada!  I think we are the only
school to switch from Java to Ada.  But I still can't rest.  Last
Spring there was an experimental section of the first course that was
Python based.  I imagine that the mantra at SIGCSE 2009 will be "Java
is dead, long live Python."

John