W. Wesley Groleau (Wes) wrote:
>
> Philip Johnson wrote:
> >
> > W. Wesley Groleau (Wes) wrote:
> >
> >      I suggest (and intend to tell the VIPs directly) that any
> >      student in
> >      a service academy should be at least as familiar with Ada as
> >      with
> >      any other language.  If necessary, use a little of the
> >      proposed
> >      $1.5 million "investment in infrastructure" to ensure this.
> >
> > Wes,

Several years ago I attended a meeting at GWU where the various
accrediting
agencies (ABET, AACSB, CSAB, ...) made presentations to educational
liaisons
from foreign embassies.  One of the people there was a computer science
faculty member from one of the service academies.  While talking with
this
individual I asked them why they were not teaching with Ada.  The reply
was
that Ada was too hard for their students.  It was better to teach them
programming with a system with a good debugger because they did not have
time for concept development, because their students were too busy with
other courses!  That’s why they teach them C/C++, there more interested
in teaching students how to use a debugger than in teaching good
software development concepts (at least for that one service).  And we
wonder why military software development is in a shambles - let’s all
learn to program with debuggers and not analyze and plan.

I find this personally interesting because in my 25+ years of software
development, I happen to need a debugger twice.  Once to prove to IBM
that there were incompatibilities between various Fortran compilers on
the same machine (No surprise there).  An once to find a problem when I
tried to take a shortcut constructing a system in Ada (I found out why
you should never use the use clause, or at least be judicious in its
use).