From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: border2.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!usenet.blueworldhosting.com!feeder01.blueworldhosting.com!news.swapon.de!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Jeffrey Carter Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Languages don't matter. A mathematical refutation Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2015 10:45:34 -0700 Organization: Also freenews.netfront.net; news.tornevall.net; news.eternal-september.org Message-ID: References: <59ac455c-72f6-43e2-8a79-efc0f3e16d9a@googlegroups.com> <1a703c01-bdf8-42ed-bb8c-1edce263ba6e@googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2015 17:44:45 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="3f77efd256cd7097938236a53a6861ee"; logging-data="32730"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/qGjDCSkUKnFuCbUj+uAU3H/9hBxBiIAE=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.5.0 In-Reply-To: <1a703c01-bdf8-42ed-bb8c-1edce263ba6e@googlegroups.com> Cancel-Lock: sha1:u8dINsN5tlCgNB1i6nzp4ChXeJA= Xref: number.nntp.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:192573 Date: 2015-03-26T10:45:34-07:00 List-Id: On 03/26/2015 08:01 AM, Jean François Martinez wrote: > On Thursday, March 26, 2015 at 2:43:02 PM UTC+1, Maciej Sobczak wrote: > >> At some point in time programming was introduced as a subject in the >> schools that precede university. You know, just as today some people are >> trying to push programming to nursery schools. The level (and therefore >> age) when programming is first introduced becomes lower and lower with time >> and this means that at the university level, as years go by, you can expect >> students to have higher and higher initial programming experience. Years >> ago a typical student entered university with zero programming experience >> and now this initial experience is significantly higher, thus allowing >> students to be more successful with exercises if the exercises do not >> change. And since such changes in the scholar system are introduced in a >> step-wise manner, you can also expect that at some particular time in the >> past the batch of new students had a step-wise more experience at the >> entry. >> > > Good objection. It would be valid between, say, people having entered > university in 1985 and people entering in 2015. But from one year to another > success rate went from 0 (zero) to 50%. Do you _really_ think in one year of > programming in Visual Basic in high school, that's s one year where they also > had to attend to a number of disciplines unrelated to programming, made such > a difference? As I understand it, the course did not replace C with Ada; it allowed Ada as an alternative to C. Some teams continued to use C while others used Ada. The last I heard, no team ever completed the project in C, even after teams succeeded with Ada. This invalidates Sobczak's point. -- Jeff Carter "Since I strongly believe that overpopulation is by far the greatest problem in the world, this [Soylent Green] would be my only message movie." Charleton Heston 123