mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) (05/11/91)
It makes sense to use book sales as a reasonable measure of language acceptance, so here's a fact for you trivia buffs: I have it on good authority that one of the best-selling Pascal books for CS1 (not the biggest seller) has sold over 500,000 copies in its 10-year life. Averaging it out, and assuming the other 3 best-sellers did about as well, we have ~200,000 CS1-or-equivalent students per year learning Pascal in its various dialects. It is mind-boggling to contemplate the salutary effect on the Ada industry if all these students came out of school speaking Ada instead of Pascal. At this stage, there are no more than a few thousand CS1 students learning Ada (this is an estimate based on what I know about book adoptions). There is a vast, untapped pool of Ada proponents out there. How long do you think it will take before the Ada industry wakes up and smells the coffee? If they should read this note, I figure the compiler folks will no doubt see this pool of students (and their teachers) as a vast untapped _market_ to whom to sell compilers. That's not what I mean. Imagine, if you dare, turning even 50,000 students a year into Ada advocates. Don't you think it's about time, Ada vendors, to start seeing the teachers and the students as allies rather than customers? There's a big movement in undergraduate CS to teach C++ to the first-year students. I conjecture that many teachers and students will experience frustration with the vagaries of C in the hands of novices, and C/C++ will remain the upper-division (3rd and 4th year) language it is now. The lower-division language will no doubt remain a combination of Turbo Pascal and think Pascal (for the Mac schools). Where does this leave Ada? Out in the woods unless the industry changes its attitude soon. Disclaimer: as an Ada book author, I obviously would earn some royalties if Ada really caught fire. I'm not counting my chickens, though. Mike Feldman