Re: an interested business-oriented programmer

[Michal Nowak <vinnie@inetia.pl>]

In <3B1EAAB4.5C86F53D@lmtas.lmco.com> Gary Scott wrote:

>If you want to get STUDENTS trained in Ada, then you've got to make it
>easy for them.  They're NOT going to accept a basic command line tool
>set environment to any great extent (sure a few 'geeks' will).

I partially disagree. I'm still a student, just started learning Ada. That't true
- make Ada easy for students. But, I think, the most important thing is to
teach us thinking in Ada (I purposely refer to Bruce Eckel's book
"Thinking in Java"). I had just two lectures on Ada, during which I was
shown introdunction, mostly taken form "Ada for C++ programmers" from
Adahome. This led to mispopularity of Ada among many of my friends.
They tried nearly automatically translate (or rather transform) their
C++ - style ideas into Ada code. And it didn't work. It didn't work even for
so initial problems concerning strings and classes. Some of they complained
that this is strange language, because of above, and that they will not use
in future. Some of them wrote just simple programs, just to pass projects,
get back into C++/Java and forget about Ada. I nearly did the same, but
synchronization mechanisms and clarity of code interested me. I thought,
that maybe I will find something interesting, and even if I will not write later
programs in Ada, I may find some information useful in project. I started to
search, found some documents and started to learning Ada from basics.
I do not regret it. During writing Ada programs I must just switch from
C-thinking to Ada-thinking and everything is much simpler.
Command line tools: what can be simpler and easier than write:
gnatmake hello.adb, or
gnatdist hello.cfg
And in this case you have control over all of your code and compilation
process. Moreover, source code is more portable. No extra environment-
dependent variables. For me it is the easiest way to compile programs.

Mike Nowak