MFELDMAN@GWUVM.BITNET (mike feldman) (05/04/87)
Nice going again, Ed. A cynic's view of all this might be that some of these contractors (and their opposite numbers in the DoD project offices) may - precisely - _want_ Ada to fail so they can continue with business as usual or find a convenient excuse for a waiver. You might accuse me of coming from a self-serving position, which I am, but I'm still convinced that the "Ada community" is still going about this in a short-term fashion. Ada and modern software engineering will succeed in the long run if we make it pervasive in the education process, which means - in the long run - pervasive in university/college computing education. This means a number of things: 1. Get the computer science and computer engineering accreditation bureaucracies to recognize that software engineering is a legitimate discipline for undergraduates. It's no coincidence that most software engineering teaching is done at the grad level - you don't have to satisfy accreditation bean-counters because graduate programs aren't accredited, only undergrad (did you know that?). 2. Get the recognized textbook authors and mainstream publishers to write books that will fit university curricula, which will not change overnight. _Very few_ Ada-oriented books fit into the right undergrad pigeonholes. I tried to do that with my Data Structures book, which sneaks Ada and software engineering into a mainstream undergrad course - where is my competition? Booch's new components book is _wonderful_ but probably too voluminous and overtly Ada-oriented to work in undergraduate courses, although I would love to be proved wrong. 3. The Ada compilers-and-tools industry is also taking the let's-get-the short-term-bucks approach. This is a well-known hobbyhorse of mine, so I won't bore you with it again - but until the schools can get into Ada and Ada environments without going broke in the process, they'll stick to good ol' Pascal or whatever (Modula-2 _is_ starting to catch fire, though: do you think most of the same software engineering can be done with packages but no other Ada goodies?).The quality of PC and Mac tools for Pascal and C oriented education gets better every day. And students can buy it for $35-50 a copy. Where is the _software engineering_ education tool stuff? Where is Ada for the Mac? Does anyone seriously believe that a school will plunk down $10000 for _one_ copy of AdaGraph,even if you buy into the Pamela culture? Does anyone seriously think a school will invest heavily in Alsys systems? We have _30_ AT's in a lab. Shall we put Alsys on 30 machines, or spend the same money to buy 30 Macs or PS2/50's? If you were the guy making a recommendation to University managers (who are _really_ naive about software engineering), what would you recommend? This is not a hypothetical question: I am in in _exactly_ that position. Ed, and all the rest of you on the net: I'm not asking you for a handout. I've spent the last five years building grassroots support for Ada in my own school. I got it, but boy was it hard work, and I am not sure I would invest the effort again, because 5 years ago I thought industry would recognize the need to do this nationally, but boy have I been disillusioned! Ada and modern software engineering have _tremendous_ potential, and not just in the military community. I have spent five years as a computer-science professor trying to realize some of this potential. Industry: a few of us in the schools out here are really workin' hard to help you out; anybody ready to help _us_? Michael Feldman, Professor Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science The George Washington University Washington, DC 20052 202-994-7593 MFELDMAN@GWUVM.BITNET MFELDMAN%GWUVM.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU