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

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

On Monday, July 9, 2018 at 7:34:09 AM UTC-5, Bill Findlay wrote:
> On 8 Jul 2018, Dan'l Miller wrote
> (in article<877d0a01-d342-433c-a541-3662736ae857@googlegroups.com>):
> 
> > 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.

My alma mater had an all-Ada83 computer-science department in the school of engineering, fashioned out an older computer-technologist department.  I went through the final grandfathered era of the mathematics department teaching the computer-science-proper courses.  Some universities and some schools within otherwise-nonAda universities strongly embraced Ada as the definitive wave of the future (because they saw DoD's extant Ada mandate on the table, but not the forthcoming POSIX mandate from DoCommerce/GSA/NIST).

> > I strongly suspect that was because of universities' desire for finding favor
> > in AT&T's eyes regarding coveted Unix licenses (pre-1984) ...
> 
> (a) We had a Unix licence since 1975, and a BSD licence since 1978.
> 
> (b) The people who negotiated licences were not the people who decided which 
> language to teach.

Yeah right.  Letting the C fruit rot on the vine after the gardener carefully cultivated that coveted licensing relationship would not have gone over very well.

Troublesome heads of departments can easily be shuffled back into the deck.  Troublesome deans almost as easily.  The nail that stands out shall be hammered down.

> So no, paranoia about AT&T had nothing to do with it.
> Knee jerk aversion to the products of the DoD had everything to do with it.

In the telecom industry of that era (i.e., the 2nd largest amount of realtime embedded systems), that same* knee-jerk reaction was the basis of the motivation for developing CHILL and C++ (and to some degree the unwavering dedication to C as the workhorse at AT&T, and to some degree AT&T's PL/I divorce in 1969).

* with respect to not-invented-here technology; not w.r.t. to any anti-war anti-military stance that might have been present in universities post-Vietnam

> > Every college and university (or school/division/department therewithin)
> > hitched their gravytrain wagons to 1 of those 3 during the 1980s.
> 
> In your experience, which was not ours.

Yes, in my direct observation:  it varied per campus in regional university systems.  It varied per school on the same campus.  At times, it varied even per department within the same school (e.g., math/hard-sciences versus computer science).  One might be fervently a VMS shop, the other fervently a BSD shop.  One might be a diversity shop (e.g., all of MULTICS, PRIMOS, VMS, HP, DG, IBM-world), the other might be a monolithic shop (e.g., only VMS; only IBM-world).  It all depended on who from corporate world was on the curriculum-advisory committee for that university or campus, on who was donating what gratis, and on what network of other appointments the staff had with research labs or defense contractors or other universities to mimic.