> > And Visual Basic is a LOT easier ... my students all ran
> >their first GUI-oriented programs with various degrees of bells and
> >whistles after 1.5 hours of instruction and 1.5 hours of lab.
>   Do your Ada students use GUI Builders or thick bindings, and
> it still takes them more than 3 hours till first GUI program?
> p.s. In original BASIC "PRINT 2+2" was *really* quick to learn.

Maybe it's like every GUI builder I ever had to use:  You can get a very
attractive interface almost immediately--but it takes a lot of editing of
the unreadable autogenerated code to get anything useful.  (And if you're
a perfectionist about having things line up horizontally or vertically,
you have to hand-edit the pixel coordinates in the GUI intermediate
files.)