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When I attended GWU, we were required to take two semesters of Ada. The professor who wrote the Ada 95 book would give us cash as we found logical or typograph

When I attended GWU, we were required to take two semesters of Ada. The professor who wrote the Ada 95 book would give us cash as we found logical or typographical errors in the book. Not sure if there are any other universities that push Ada so hard in intro classes. Perhaps this has changed now. Any recent GWU compsci people care to comment?

callmeed 15y ago
Ada was uned in my first two comp sci classes at junior college. Our instructors were defense contractor programmers at Vandenberg AFB.
dxbydt 15y ago
I studied Ada 3 semesters & taught Ada 1 semester at WVU. I think it had to do with the fact that West Virginia Univ was big on defense, NASA & FBI projects which mandated Ada. Some of those avenues have materialized bigtime: http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/west-virginia-university-named-national-leader-for-fbi-biometrics-research http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/west-virgini... Ultimately I felt it was not such a fair deal for the students. Over 50% of grad CS WVU students were non-US, so they would never get to work on these Defense related stuff due to sec-clearance. Ada was also touted as a successful example of design-by-committee, which I found quite nauseating.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  Go Mountaineers! Are there currently any decent developer jobs in WV? I would love to move to the Greebrier County area. Montani Semper Liberi
ahi 15y ago
Maybe I'm recent enough. I enrolled and took intro courses in Fall of 2001, graduated in 2005. My intro courses, IIRC "intro to CS" and "algos & data structures" were Ada. 2nd year Software Engineering was Java. I think students starting Fall of 2002 had an entirely Java curriculum. At the time I was kind of annoyed to be learning Ada rather than Java, especially because the faculty member who wrote the assigned Ada textbook couldn't be bothered to actually teach the course. However, looking back on it I think Ada is a better language for learning than Java because everything is so explicit. I still have Ada on my resume, mostly for shits and giggles. I'd take it off if I was applying anywhere that might ask me to prove it. EDIT: Reconsidering. Ada pushes you toward the waterfall development process which can be dangerous for newbs to internalize.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  Out of personal curiosity, what was your reasoning when deciding to attend GWU? Would you recommend it to others?
  - ahi 15y ago
    Location, location, location. Columbia said no thanks. CMU said "okay, but no CS major". Case Western offered better money and athletics but it's in Cleveland. Johns Hopkins seemed like 80% premed jackasses. I didn't consider Georgetown because when I was looking at schools my dad didn't want to pay for parking. I initially wrote out a very long description of GW before I realized you had attended. So shortened considerably: I went to grad school at U of Michigan and have come to the conclusion that most colleges/universities are basically the same. For such an important decision with such wide-ranging consequences, where you go to school is relatively hard to screw up. Undergraduate education is mostly foolish and cult-like behavior--Go Blue!--in a pretty setting where you can find an education and lifelong friends if you look for them. When people recommend a school they are usually recommending the cult. I went to Freshman orientation on my 18th birthday. I had been away from home a week and living down the street from the State Department and the White House when the Pentagon went boom. GW was my training ground for adulthood. The experience is so integral to who I am, to recommend it feels a bit odd.
    - chopsueyar 15y ago
      Thurston Hall?
      - ahi 15y ago
        Lafayette at 21st and I. I don't think I would have survived Thurston.
        chopsueyar 15y ago
        You haven't lived until you've experienced 4 people living in a 400sqft room with one bathroom, all NAT'ing a single Ricochet wireless modem, simultaneously downloading MP3s from UPenn student's FTP sites. It was before Thurston had an ethernet network. All of the other dorms seemed to have direct fiber and media converters. 1300 people in a 9 story building. Especially fun, when a block from the dorm, somebody ran over a fire hydrant, and the water supply had to be shut off for several blocks, including Thurston (there were no tank toilets). 8 hours of clogged toilets on every single floor, including the public bathrooms and study lounges. ...or the false fire alarms, where all 1300 students evacuate from only two sets of stairwells. ...or when facilities management decides it is warm enough to enable air conditioning. Good memories. I have more, but this is enough for now.
davemarchevsky 15y ago
I'm (hopefully) going to graduate GWU's CS program in May 2012; Ada is no longer part of the curriculum AFAIK.
vbtemp 15y ago
Feldman's last year was my first year there. He had a great legacy, but in his final years he wasn't too popular among the students, and I think not too many people were sad to see him go at that point. EDIT: That said, the last thing I expected to see scanning the HN headlines today was something from gwu.edu :-P
- ahi 15y ago
  I wasn't going to name names, but I remember many people not being pleased that we were required to buy his textbook even though he had clearly checked out. In fairness, he had a great reputation because he was a very good teacher. He just took his sweet time retiring.
  - chopsueyar 15y ago
    http://www.amazon.com/Ada-95-Problem-Solving-Program/dp/0201304856 http://www.amazon.com/Ada-95-Problem-Solving-Program/dp/0201... IS this the book you guys used?
    - ahi 15y ago
      The 3rd edition looks familiar.
hedgie 15y ago
No Ada at my (big ten) school but I work coding Ada at my current job. The language is amazing. Most of my errors are related to copy-paste oversights (Message_1 instead of Message_2). The typing is very elegant. Also, Java stole Ada's way of handling exceptions. Instead of try catch you have begin/exception. It's a shame so few people use Ada. They recently converted GNAT (a free Ada compiler and a very good one) to work with lego mindstorms. It's still big in safety critical areas (transport systems - the trains in europe run ada and lots of avionics code is in ada, the medical field and if I hear correctly banks sometimes use it as well). It takes longer to get it to compile but having no array indexing errors is so worth it.

callmeed 15y ago

Ada was uned in my first two comp sci classes at junior college. Our instructors were defense contractor programmers at Vandenberg AFB.

dxbydt 15y ago

I studied Ada 3 semesters & taught Ada 1 semester at WVU. I think it had to do with the fact that West Virginia Univ was big on defense, NASA & FBI projects which mandated Ada. Some of those avenues have materialized bigtime: http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/west-virginia-university-named-national-leader-for-fbi-biometrics-research http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/west-virgini... Ultimately I felt it was not such a fair deal for the students. Over 50% of grad CS WVU students were non-US, so they would never get to work on these Defense related stuff due to sec-clearance. Ada was also touted as a successful example of design-by-committee, which I found quite nauseating.

chopsueyar 15y ago
Go Mountaineers! Are there currently any decent developer jobs in WV? I would love to move to the Greebrier County area. Montani Semper Liberi

ahi 15y ago

Maybe I'm recent enough. I enrolled and took intro courses in Fall of 2001, graduated in 2005. My intro courses, IIRC "intro to CS" and "algos & data structures" were Ada. 2nd year Software Engineering was Java. I think students starting Fall of 2002 had an entirely Java curriculum. At the time I was kind of annoyed to be learning Ada rather than Java, especially because the faculty member who wrote the assigned Ada textbook couldn't be bothered to actually teach the course. However, looking back on it I think Ada is a better language for learning than Java because everything is so explicit. I still have Ada on my resume, mostly for shits and giggles. I'd take it off if I was applying anywhere that might ask me to prove it. EDIT: Reconsidering. Ada pushes you toward the waterfall development process which can be dangerous for newbs to internalize.

chopsueyar 15y ago
Out of personal curiosity, what was your reasoning when deciding to attend GWU? Would you recommend it to others?
- ahi 15y ago
  Location, location, location. Columbia said no thanks. CMU said "okay, but no CS major". Case Western offered better money and athletics but it's in Cleveland. Johns Hopkins seemed like 80% premed jackasses. I didn't consider Georgetown because when I was looking at schools my dad didn't want to pay for parking. I initially wrote out a very long description of GW before I realized you had attended. So shortened considerably: I went to grad school at U of Michigan and have come to the conclusion that most colleges/universities are basically the same. For such an important decision with such wide-ranging consequences, where you go to school is relatively hard to screw up. Undergraduate education is mostly foolish and cult-like behavior--Go Blue!--in a pretty setting where you can find an education and lifelong friends if you look for them. When people recommend a school they are usually recommending the cult. I went to Freshman orientation on my 18th birthday. I had been away from home a week and living down the street from the State Department and the White House when the Pentagon went boom. GW was my training ground for adulthood. The experience is so integral to who I am, to recommend it feels a bit odd.
  - chopsueyar 15y ago
    Thurston Hall?
    - ahi 15y ago
      Lafayette at 21st and I. I don't think I would have survived Thurston.
      - chopsueyar 15y ago
        You haven't lived until you've experienced 4 people living in a 400sqft room with one bathroom, all NAT'ing a single Ricochet wireless modem, simultaneously downloading MP3s from UPenn student's FTP sites. It was before Thurston had an ethernet network. All of the other dorms seemed to have direct fiber and media converters. 1300 people in a 9 story building. Especially fun, when a block from the dorm, somebody ran over a fire hydrant, and the water supply had to be shut off for several blocks, including Thurston (there were no tank toilets). 8 hours of clogged toilets on every single floor, including the public bathrooms and study lounges. ...or the false fire alarms, where all 1300 students evacuate from only two sets of stairwells. ...or when facilities management decides it is warm enough to enable air conditioning. Good memories. I have more, but this is enough for now.

davemarchevsky 15y ago

I'm (hopefully) going to graduate GWU's CS program in May 2012; Ada is no longer part of the curriculum AFAIK.

vbtemp 15y ago

Feldman's last year was my first year there. He had a great legacy, but in his final years he wasn't too popular among the students, and I think not too many people were sad to see him go at that point. EDIT: That said, the last thing I expected to see scanning the HN headlines today was something from gwu.edu :-P

ahi 15y ago
I wasn't going to name names, but I remember many people not being pleased that we were required to buy his textbook even though he had clearly checked out. In fairness, he had a great reputation because he was a very good teacher. He just took his sweet time retiring.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  http://www.amazon.com/Ada-95-Problem-Solving-Program/dp/0201304856 http://www.amazon.com/Ada-95-Problem-Solving-Program/dp/0201... IS this the book you guys used?
  - ahi 15y ago
    The 3rd edition looks familiar.

hedgie 15y ago

No Ada at my (big ten) school but I work coding Ada at my current job. The language is amazing. Most of my errors are related to copy-paste oversights (Message_1 instead of Message_2). The typing is very elegant. Also, Java stole Ada's way of handling exceptions. Instead of try catch you have begin/exception. It's a shame so few people use Ada. They recently converted GNAT (a free Ada compiler and a very good one) to work with lego mindstorms. It's still big in safety critical areas (transport systems - the trains in europe run ada and lots of avionics code is in ada, the medical field and if I hear correctly banks sometimes use it as well). It takes longer to get it to compile but having no array indexing errors is so worth it.