From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FROM_ADDR_WS, FROM_WSP_TRAIL autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.unit0.net!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Bill Findlay Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Teaching C/C++ from Ada perspective? Date: 9 Jul 2018 19:34:05 GMT Message-ID: References: <856189aa-fa00-4960-929e-174f352310ad@googlegroups.com> <2718c8d4-5f35-4fd8-a1aa-1e60069a7a5d@googlegroups.com> <39fce60c-9f56-42fb-b679-fa08810b00ee@googlegroups.com> <3701bf07-89a5-4cb0-a704-5aebb589ca79@googlegroups.com> <2f5e4ce0-94e8-4b94-9da7-045ec90a9b22@googlegroups.com> <9bb99fb4-b9c7-4516-97b5-da41466e96be@googlegroups.com> <1162d6bf-c226-4089-ae2e-870c7da9c80f@googlegroups.com> <2f5399b4-518b-4a2e-9941-2ae267d51309@googlegroups.com> <1ab5db5c-7892-40a8-ae36-ca1ec1168768@googlegroups.com> <0001HW.20F291E2002A542F70000C5E92CF@news.individual.net> <877d0a01-d342-433c-a541-3662736ae857@googlegroups.com> <0001HW.20F38DBF004C10E470000C5E92CF@news.individual.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net JP2YbJYmmQvz9K7t8Hit7wCAvqbU8M1fkCRCXF0+tZJdAl4ru9 Cancel-Lock: sha1:iPu3ZU10eJsqJsXftWrlXWJ0Okg= sha1:G3jt1gg14FOmofGQxddId4qkylA= User-Agent: NewsTap/5.3.1 (iPad) Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:53745 Date: 2018-07-09T19:34:05+00:00 List-Id: Dan'l Miller 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