[GAP] Regarding Cyril's Reply to My Rant

[Robert Dewar]

Riehle, Richard (CIV) wrote:
> Thanks, 

> Unfortunately, the students look at the choice from a future
> employment perspective.   With the perception of a decline in job
> opportunities, students will grumble about Ada. 

It's odd that for years we taught Pascal when it was not widely
used in industry because we thought it the best choice pedagogically.
And students did not grumble.

Now we go with language-du-jour and teach Java (why not Visual
Basic, which is still much more widely used, or C# which is
dominant in the windows environment? or even COBOL, still
widely used, and there is a serious shortage of COBOL
programmers). Java is a very bad choice for many reasons.
As I say, Bjarne's perspective on this issue is very
interesting.

But I would not worry too much. In fact it is quite silly for
employers to worry about what language graduates know. What
is terrible is that they know nothing about building large
critical programs. That's much more of a problem.

But people can of course learn what they need.

A manager from BAE said to me at the safety conference in
London a couple of weeks ago

"When a colleague raises this nonsense about students from
universities not knowing Ada, I point out that they also
know nothing about composite materials, does he think we
should build planes out of wood?" :-)

The important point here is not to rant, but instead figure
out how you can actually achieve some real gains in awareness.
If your goal is to have Ada taught as a first language in
all major universities in the US, you are whistling in the
wind, and will just get frustrated when this does not happen.
After all this is the country where in 1968 universities
in a survey said that their *ideal* language for teaching
in the future was Fortran! :-(