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

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

On Sunday, July 1, 2018 at 12:08:57 PM UTC-5, Luke A. Guest wrote:
> <kouaoua16@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Dear all,
> > 
> > Thank you very much for your replies. Perhaps I should think twice before
> > accepting this teaching offer. Once you go Ada it is hard to think of
> > other languages that are not as good as Ada!
> 
> Maybe you should teach Ada with c/c++ shown as counter examples?

This!  This from Luke!

My Fortran77 class was taught this way as a series of anecdotes:  embarrassment-eye-roll anti-Pascal-in-translation.  It was my first programming class Pascal and Fortran77.  Fortran was taught by lambasting Fortran77-per-se, showing instead how to import Pascal ideas into Fortran.  2/3rds of the class was Pascal to teach how to do things correctly.  1/6th of the class was taught as:  don't ever do this legal-Fortran77 language construct in Fortran77 programs.  1/6th of the class was taught as:  here is how to write the Pascal concept in analogous good Fortran77.  And practically all of Fortran66 was condemned wholesale.

The counterexamples can take 3 forms:

1) Look at what a disaster this is was C++ historically up to C++2003, partially mitigated nowadays.

2) Look at how incrementally better C++{11,14,17,20} & their standard libraries are than C++{cfront/ARM/C++1990, C++1998, C++2003}.

3) Look via the aforementioned Adaesque library that I the professor whipped up at how C++ as standardized is really just a bunch of half-baked primitives to write a stronger closer-to-fully-baked library.

I almost think that modern C++ and even features like restricted keyword in C99 are more to drive consultants' & library-writers' businesses than to be a well-designed language.  The reason that C++ has half-baked features might actually be to beget market demand for more-fully-baked C++ libraries than the raw language provides.  And heaven help the poor employee at an enterprise that doesn't cultivate its own roll-your-own/harvest-the-web to arrive at a set of more-fully-baked set of libraries.  (My own résumé reads like:  wrote libraries to back-fill all the major gaps in C++ at this employer, and oh did much the same a little differently at that employer, and yet again at the next employer but this time extended from a prior open-source basis.)