I've noticed that although Ada is an extremely powerful language, and it
has gained much popularity in the past few years, like the Unix operating
system, it hasn't been accepted by the K-12 community like it should be.
For example, I have learned that most of the middle schools in my city use
HyperCard and HTML, and the high schools use Pascal and C.  This is my
assessment on those languages: HyperCard, like Apple, is dying.  It can't
really do anything except for simple "multimedia" projects.  Pascal,
although it's an OK language, is obsolete.  If kids want to learn a
language, then they should learn one that will be widely used in the
future.  Pascal doesn't have as strong a following as it did in the 70's
and 80's, and BASIC, IMO, was obsolete when Kemeny and Kurtz first got the
idea for it.  C is a great language - it's very powerful, and it's great
for systems programming (well, it was designed for that, after all :)  But
there's one little problem:  it's too hard to learn as a first language.
I think that if a teacher wants to make a logical selection, he/she should
choose a language that's easy to learn, has all the capabilities of a
more popular language such as C, and will probably be used widely in the
future.  Well, Ada fits into all these catagories.  After all, although
Ada's pretty damn big, it's still pretty easy, and easier than Pascal in
some ways.

                                                        -Eric-

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| "It is what sustained us through our         |
|  days, the truth that was in our hearts      |
|  and strength in our arms, and fulfillment   |
|  in our tounges."-The Celtic warrior Oisin   |
|                                              |
|  Eric DeArment                               |
|  [log in to unmask]                                 |
|  Team Ada                                    |
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