[GAP] advice on Ada in general programming languages course

[Riehle, Richard USA]

I am teaching Ada as part of a class called 

       Programming Paradigms

In this course, I start with Scheme and Lisp and
move through C, C++, Ada, and, toward the end, some
scripting languages.   The students already have two
quarters of Java behind them.

I have found that the students love to write programs
that have some graphics associated with their output.
The easiest of all resources to make this fun for the 
students has turned out to be JEWL.   While JEWL is not
an industrial strength Windows development environment
of the quality of CLAW, it is an easy place for the
students to really enjoy doing Ada.   

At the end of this course, I have students who actually
think Ada is fun.  

Typically, I assign at least two programs that use JEWL.
One is a statistics program in which they display the
results of their computations (min, max, mean, stdev,
etc) using some kind of line or bar chart.  The other is
a program where they have to option of using tasking for
a small version of PONG.   They have to move the left and
right paddles up and down, send the ball across the screen,
and keep score.   Now and then a student will produce a
really interesting version of the program.  

In my experience, when students can create interesting programs
with Ada, programs that are as interesting as those they create
with other languages, they come away from the experience really
liking the language.   

This may not be as close to the Ada niche of safety-critical 
software, but it does get them excited about using it.  Also,
JEWL is so compact and easy to use that some students go on
to use it for other assignments in other classes, much to chagrin
and disgust of those professors who prefer other languages.

I do encourage those students who are doing more serious software
to use CLAW and other more industrial-strength libraries, but for
the beginning student, someone who comes to Ada already skeptical,
the delight of being able to do really interesting programs makes
a big difference.

Most of my students are already in their early to mid thirties. One
of them came to me one day and said his eight year old son is now
driving him to improve and enhance the PONG game.  They are desiging
it together with suggestions from the eight-year old.   Not only do
I have a student of my own who is enjoying Ada, but he is now sharing
it with his son.

This might seem a little too lightweight for the professional
programmers
who frequent this forum, but it does have the benefit of letting people
who have heard only negative things about Ada get turned around and 
realize that it can be fun.   Once they get to that point, they are
ready to the counter opinions to the contrary that are so prevalent
here at NPS.

Richard Riehle