[said Ed] > > As an MIT alum myself, I can say that my experience was that Ada was not > only largely unknown, but largely derided by those who do know (a very > little) about it. This was over 10 years ago, of course, but I'm not > surprised that things haven't changed much. I'm glad to see that someone is > giving Ada 95 at least a little more exposure! There was a note from Mark Eichin, who gave that talk at MIT, to this list the other day. > > Not that C and C++ were that much loved at MIT, either (well, C++ didn't > exist when I was there, but anyway...). The intro computer science course > is taught using Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, which has a much different > culture than Ada (not that I mean to be negative here -- Lisp is my other > favorite language!). On the other hand, MIT does include a Software > Engineering course in its CS curriculum (taken in the senior year), which > at least used to be taught using Clu -- a modular language that had some > influence on Ada 83's ADT facilities. I've spoken to some at MIT who assert that while the Scheme course is the first course taken by CS majors, in order to be a CS major there, effectively you also must have a good bit of programming experience. The Reid Report (I'll send the latest in the next note) shows a fair amount of support for Scheme as the CS1 language, but Reid defines this the only reasonable way: the first course taken by majors. In some universities, you don;t get to be a major till your second year, and to be accepted in the major you must already have gotten good marks in one (sometimes two) programming courses. As far as I can tell, in many - if not most - of the Ada-in-CS1 schools, the first Ada course is genuinely the _first_ course! That is the case, for example, here at GW. I've found that students with prior univ. or HS experience (maybe 50% of enrollment) distribute up and down the same curve as students with no prior experience. The combination of Ada, Unix, and the software engineering flavor of the course tend to level out the differences. (A commentary on the code-only emphasis in many HS courses!) The 4 English-language Ada 95-for-CS1 textbooks (Feldman/Koffman, Culwin, English, and Skansholm) are all designed for students with no programming experience and they do seem to work in that context. The same holds for Ada 83-for-CS1 texts (Dale/Lilly/McCormick and others). RE: Clu - the main developer of Clu (which, I think, lives on at MIT) is Barbara Liskov of MIT. Indeed Clu - an exploratory ADT lab language of the early 70s, extended many times since, was a strong influence on Ada, especially in packages, generics, and exceptions. ("Clu" is simply an abbreviation for "clusters", their term for ADTs.) Liskov was, if memory serves, involved off and on in Ada 83, perhaps as a Distinguished Reviewer or whatever. There is a certain amount of anti-Ada snobbery in the universities, much of it stemming from the "$600 toilet seat" effect, i.e., that nothing DoD commissions could be any good. I always chuckle when I see this sort of thing on the net, as people write their e-mail on Berkeley Unix-based workstations (lots of DoD $$ went to Berkeley to develop their Unix variant), then send it out over a TCPIP layer, which we all know was originally a DoD project. Happily, I think this sort of thing is diminishing, though we have a ways to go yet. > > Ed Seidewitz DHR Technologies, Inc. Michael Feldman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Michael B. Feldman - chair, SIGAda Education Working Group Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science The George Washington University - Washington, DC 20052 USA 202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Whaddya mean, the Air Traffic Control system won't run without a Microsoft browser??!!!" -- political cartoon, Washington Post, Jan. 3, 1998 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ada on WWW: http://www.acm.org/sigada/education or http://www.adahome.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------