Teaching languages (was: can one build commercial applications with latest gnat and other licenses related questions...)

["Björn Persson" <spam-away@nowhere.nil>]

M E Leypold wrote:
> Let me also add: Having tought software engineering courses at german
> universities I wouldn't try to introduce Ada as a teaching language
> there today: Whereas the language has all it should have, the skill
> set acquired by the students would be only usable in very restricted
> scenarios and this in a small market anyway.

If they were software engineering courses I really hope you taught your 
students something more than a programming language. I was taught 
Scheme, Pascal and Java in university courses. At work I currently use 
C++, and a little Python, Perl and Bash. Yet I do use what I learned in 
those courses: structured programming, information hiding, algorithms, 
data structures and all that. Universities do teach programming 
languages, because you can't teach programming without a language, but 
the language isn't the skill set that the students are supposed to 
acquire. Pascal was designed specifically for teaching, and I doubt my 
teachers expected that I'd ever write commercial applications in Scheme. 
Give your students a good grasp of the paradigms and concepts of 
computer science, and introduce them to a few different languages (the 
more different the better), and they'll be able to apply their knowledge 
to new languages as needed.

-- 
Bj�rn Persson                              PGP key A88682FD
                    omb jor ers @sv ge.
                    r o.b n.p son eri nu