From: John McCormick <mccormick@cs.uni.edu>
Subject: Re: is Ada still being used for teaching at universities?
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2011 06:22:07 -0700 (PDT)
Date: 2011-03-13T06:22:07-07:00 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <f464c594-f1b7-4b6b-adff-195b801000ea@17g2000prr.googlegroups.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: ileigu$61k$1@speranza.aioe.org
On Mar 11, 8:33 pm, "Nasser M. Abbasi" <n...@12000.org> wrote:
> I made a survey of text books today at my university book store,
> and I could not find a single book on Ada (nor on Fortran for that matter).
>
> --Nasser
Ada is still being used for teaching. A couple of pieces of
evidence: There are around 120 schools participating in the GAP (GNAT
Academic Program) sponsored by AdaCore. In 2010 I had a banner year
in sales of my two Freshman level Ada textbooks (Intro to Programming
and Data Structures). You won't find any Ada textbooks at college
book stores where it is not required for a particular course.
Currently C++, Java, and increasingly Python are the major languages
used in Freshman courses. I'm finding students in my upper level
courses who started out in Python haven't a clue about arrays.
Another classic "low level" language feature bites the dust replaced
by dynamic data structures from massive libraries.
I have just returned from the ACM SIGCSE (Special Interest Group for
Computer Science Education) where SIGAda has a booth in the exhibit
hall. Amazing how many people stop by to say how they would love to
teach Ada to beginners but that the students would revolt if they did
not teach one of the popular three languages. I think we are the only
discipline in which the content of Freahman courses is determined by
the "want ads".
John
John
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2011-03-13 13:22 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 19+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-03-12 1:33 is Ada still being used for teaching at universities? Nasser M. Abbasi
2011-03-12 12:01 ` Peter C. Chapin
2011-03-13 13:22 ` John McCormick [this message]
2011-03-13 13:40 ` Nasser M. Abbasi
2011-03-14 13:23 ` Hyman Rosen
2011-03-15 16:00 ` Lucretia
2011-03-15 17:21 ` Pascal Obry
2011-03-15 19:16 ` Florian Weimer
2011-03-15 19:58 ` Dmitry A. Kazakov
2011-03-27 23:17 ` Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)
2011-03-28 8:26 ` Dmitry A. Kazakov
2011-03-28 10:25 ` Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)
2011-03-28 12:19 ` Dmitry A. Kazakov
2011-03-28 17:53 ` Georg Bauhaus
2011-03-27 23:12 ` Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)
2011-03-28 21:56 ` richard
2011-03-29 7:30 ` stefan-lucks
2011-03-14 11:18 ` Georg Bauhaus
2011-03-27 23:20 ` Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)
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