Re: Ada: A beginners experience

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Sunday, July 15, 2018 at 5:44:06 PM UTC-5, Bill Findlay wrote:
> On 14 Jul 2018, Jere wrote
> (in article<6febe5d6-0339-4da5-afe5-9af4e2255597@googlegroups.com>):
> 
> > On Friday, July 13, 2018 at 11:36:51 PM UTC-4, Paul Rubin wrote:
> > > This won't be a popular viewpoint here but IMHO Ada isn't a great choice
> > > as a first language. [...]
> >
> > [...] The type system (the big draw for me to Ada) is actually very streamlined. [...]
> >
> > None of this is beginner friendly though obviously.
> 
> I disagree very strongly with the idea that Ada is not a good beginners 
> language, and I
> do so as a result of the experience of introducing an Ada-based CS1 course in 
> 1996.
> 
> Most of its advanced features will never arise in such a course, and the good 
> design
> of Ada means that beginners are very unlikely to stumble upon them by 
> mistake.
> 
> The Ada course replaced one based on Pascal, and the improvement in outcomes
> was clear at an early stage. Ada is easier for beginners than Pascal, because 
> its
> syntax and semantics are more consistent. In fact, it's just amuch better 
> language.
> 
> It was interesting to stand in the lab and watch Ada-based and Pascal-based 
> beginners
> working side by side. One day, about week 6 of term, the Ada studentshad 
> nearly all
> successfully written a program that 2-D animated balls bouncing around in a 
> box.
> The Pascalstudents were grappling, mostly unsuccessfully, with a trivial 
> text-based
> read-process-output loop.
> 
> -- 
> Bill Findlay

It seems that this result could have and should have been the subject of scientific studies on first-programming-language acquisition (or at least as much as incoming freshmen approximate that, eliding any exposure in high school).  Pascal versus Ada versus C should have been quite the empirically-observable comparison during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s.  And then Java versus Ada versus  Python should have been quite the empirically-observable comparison from the latter Nineties through the latter Naughties/Aughties.

Mechanisms of, facilitators for, and impediments to first and second language acquisition has always been a primary scientific research area in natural-language linguistics, certainly since Jean Piaget or Noam Chomsky.  Our field should do the same, if for no other reason than to separate the men* from the boys** among programming languages that shape the way a programmer thinks for good or ill, perhaps actually fulfilling the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in programming & software design:  one's conceptions & mental model are shaped by the programming language in which one thinks design thoughts mentally.

* Ada, perhaps Rust, perhaps OCaml or Haskell

** C, C++, all the ‘This time for sure’ Bullwinkle-hat-trick C-done-right/C++-done-right languages (e.g., Java, J++, C#, Objective-C, Swift, Go), all the Algol-but-slightly-different languages (e.g., Pascal, Ruby, Lua), PL/I