Re: Why don't large companies use Ada?

Why do universities teach Ada?

presumably because they feel it is a good vehicle for teaching basic programming and software engineering concepts. Note that this has nothing to do with whether it is or is not used. For years, Pascal has been taught in universities because it is an effective teaching tool, not because it is widely used in real programming projects.

The argument that language X should be taught because X is used widely is what kept US universities teaching FOrtran when the rest of the world had moved on (see the survey in the British Journal of Computing, around 1971). It is a badly flawed argument which does students tremendous disservice and one that in the last 20 years has largely been rejected (how many major universities have used COBOL to teach the beginning course, because of the quite correct observation that it was -- and probably *still* is, the most widely used programming language)?

It is a shame to see people use this decrepit line of reasoning to justify teaching C in beginning courses. I guess part of the reason for this is that we are now seeing the graduate students who learned C hacking in universities under the illusion that it is programming in positions as university professors eager to teach C under the illusion that they are teaching programming :-) Received on Thu Nov 17 1994 - 00:47:44 CET