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From: jsnyder@uw-june.UUCP (J. R. Snyder)
Newsgroups: soc.college,comp.edu
Subject: Re: First Language Taught in CSC degree track
Message-ID: <2898@uw-june.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 29-Jul-87 23:32:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-june.2898
Posted: Wed Jul 29 23:32:11 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Aug-87 02:45:41 EDT
References: <1472@super.upenn.edu.upenn.edu> <3263@ncoast.UUCP> <1317@sputnik.COM> <2893@uw-june.UUCP> <455@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>
Reply-To: jsnyder@uw-june.UUCP (J. R. Snyder)
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 40
Keywords: language, CS 106 track, intro
Xref: mnetor soc.college:791 comp.edu:534

In article <455@rocky.STANFORD.EDU> mikey@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Mike Yang) writes:
>Actually, Todd's information was a little out of date.  Stanford was going
>to switch to Modula-2, but has now decided to switch to Ada (yeech) as
>the first language taught later next year. 
>
>Apparently, the Assistant Chairman for Undergraduate Education at Stanford's
>CS department feels that Modula-2 is on its way out.  I wonder if he's
>aware of the many reasons why Ada is clearly not suitable as a first
>tongue...
>
Stanford may be a special case here.  My original comments about the 
unsuitability of Ada were the product of a thought experiment in which
I tried to imagine explaining (or avoiding having to explain) concepts
like overloading, generic packages, internal vs. external representations 
of data structures, and the like, to the same bemused sophomores at
the University of Kansas to whom I, once upon a time, could hardly
convey an understanding of where to put the "begins" and "ends" in
Pascal programs.  (I am assuming that we're talking about a small
subset of Ada and don't need to give ourselves nightmares by including
rendezvous in the above laundry list.)  If the folks at Stanford 
think that their students can handle it, I'm not in a position to
contradict them.  I'm confident (pace Dijkstra) that a really good 
teacher can teach good programming practice even with Fortran or Basic,
but that's getting away from the original question.

It does seem to me irrelevant that Modula may be "on its way out." 
On its way out of where?  Certainly no one has ever been able to
argue that Modula-specific knowledge was going to be of any use to
the student outside the academic environment.  (Much better to teach
Lisp, as someone suggested.)  The issue is whether or not another 
language better supports the learning (I almost said teaching) of 
what we currently see as fundamental to good programming practice.
I hope we are making these decisions rationally and not just jumping
on bandwagons.  I certainly hope that no one decides they have to have
Ada just because Stanford has it.

jsnyder@june.cs.washington.edu.arpa         John R. Snyder
{ihnp4,decvax,ucbvax}!uw-beaver!jsnyder     Dept. of Computer Science, FR-35
                                            University of Washington
206/543-7798                                Seattle, WA 98195