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When I first started college, the intro to computer science courses were taught in Ada (this was back in '97). I don't have too many memories of it, but I do r
by shepardrtc 12y ago
When I first started college, the intro to computer science courses were taught in Ada (this was back in '97). I don't have too many memories of it, but I do remember how verbose the language was, and that drove me pretty crazy. Its not very good for teaching programming to someone who has no idea what they're doing, but after much more experience, I can appreciate the language for what it is and what it can do.
And yes, I do realize that the verbosity and safety are good qualities and certainly can teach a lot, but for a 17/18 year old who may have never seen a programming language before, its pretty crazy. It should definitely be taught at higher levels, so as to reinforce good programming standards and practices. Have a few years of wild screw-ups and crazy bugs and gain an understanding of why you need safety and so on.
- spc476 12y agoI too, encountered Ada in college (around 1990, give or take a year) and yes, compared to other languages I was familiar with at the time (BASIC, Pascal, assembly, C, Fortran) it was quite verbose and the compiler (we had to log into the VAX system to use it) was very fussy---to the point where we joked that once we got past the compiler, the program would not crash (now, whether it would produce the correct output remained to be seen). It's amusing to think these days that C++ is probably larger and more complex than Ada ever was (or even is) but that it crept slowly to that complexity level, whereas Ada was "large" at the start but hasn't gotten much bigger. It seems that if you want a large language to be popular, you should start with a small language and grow it over a twenty year period.