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

[Bill Findlay <findlaybill@blueyonder.co.uk >]

Dan'l Miller <optikos@verizon.net> wrote:
> 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.

I seem to have hit the nail on the head with “paranoia”.

>> 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.
> 

You do not seem to have considered that your observation did not extend to
my continent.

-- 
Bill Findlay