Re: Teaching C/C++ from Ada perspective?

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

On Sunday, July 8, 2018 at 1:39:34 PM UTC-5, Bill Findlay wrote:
> On 8 Jul 2018, Dan'l Miller wrote
> (in article<1ab5db5c-7892-40a8-ae36-ca1ec1168768@googlegroups.com>):
> 
> > If there is one single root-cause reason that Ada failed to launch
> > on the launchpad from, say, 1985 to 1993, it was this spurned-detest of Ada
> > in telecom, not because of what was in or not in Ada, but because telecom was
> > excluded from the selection process.
> 
> There is another.
> 
> The right-on then-dominant faction in CS academia,
> who might have been expected to welcome a language soundly based on SE 
> principles,
> boycotted it without further consideration, simply because it originated in 
> the DoD.

I strongly suspect that was because of universities' desire for finding favor in AT&T's eyes regarding coveted Unix licenses (pre-1984) and regarding POSIX (post-1986) was a big part of that.  Sometimes AT&T's largess walked in through the frontdoor of the revenue-generating admissions office:  for approximately a decade, vast quantities of AT&T's white-collar workforce was offered free tuition and lavish 18-month sabbatical to get their master degrees, fully paid for by corporate.  Low thousands  of employees signed up.

During the 1980s, the pro-Ada universities were also predominantly non-Unix, especially VMS.  Almost to 1.00 correlation.  Most corners of the technology universe back in the 1980s were either:
1) AT&T's lapdog via Unix & C or being hooked in tight with BSD's mimicking thereof,
or
2) IBM's lapdog via mainframes,
or
3) DoD's lapdog via Ada, especially looking for DARPA research grants and/or being under the influence of local defense contractors on steer-the-curriculum advisory boards.

Every college and university (or school/division/department therewithin) hitched their gravytrain wagons to 1 of those 3 during the 1980s.