Re: No top schools use Ada

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Regarding using Ada to teach computer science

 this actually works very well, I am teaching the equivalent of CS2 (i.e.
 data structures and algorithms), and there are lots of advantages, most
 notably the completely checked environment of Ada, over say C or C++.

 I can't see *any* advantage in using C++ over Ada 95 in teaching computer
 science or SE -- can you really make a case for that? Usually the choice
 is based simply on commercial popularity rather than any pedagogical
 argument (that is in those few cases where the people arguing know both
 languages well).

 Scheme is a different issue: to me it is limiting to live only in the
 functional world. For example, today I was presenting heapsort. The
 essence of this algorithm is the in place tree mapping, that's what
 makes the algorithm interesting.

 Same thing with quicksort. I have actually seen people teaching in a
 functional style and presenting a two way division sort as quicksort,
 missing the most interesting part of the algorithm, which is the
 in place partitioning.

 Yes, I know you can model this functionally, but it seems confusing to
 me to do this.

P.S. I plead guilty to subversive activities in my course, like trying
to teach students about abstraction, reuse and modularity. Hopefully
this will not *too* seriously warp their capability to do good work in
computer science.