I am a 25 years old student from one of the top CS engineering school of France.
People who enter there usually have a heavy math background, but are fairly new to programming.
The first semester all the students are introduced to basic programming concepts, and the language that's used for that is Ada. Then Ada is used to teach algorithms and compilation class. In fact in the second year, we had a full-time project where we wrote a compiler for a language close to Java (in terms of syntax and features), in Ada.
I remember being in my python phase at the time, and bitching at Ada's verbosity.
But I realized how comfortable it is to let the compiler do most of the debugging for you, especially on very large projects that are structured as a pipeline (eg. a compiler, every part depends heavily on the other). When it compiles, it works 99% of time. Static typing/subtyping, generic package, all the time spent in the console with GNAT yelling at you really teaches you how to structure, secure and bullet proof your code. Ada really is a great teacher!
The first semester all the students are introduced to basic programming concepts, and the language that's used for that is Ada. Then Ada is used to teach algorithms and compilation class. In fact in the second year, we had a full-time project where we wrote a compiler for a language close to Java (in terms of syntax and features), in Ada.
I remember being in my python phase at the time, and bitching at Ada's verbosity. But I realized how comfortable it is to let the compiler do most of the debugging for you, especially on very large projects that are structured as a pipeline (eg. a compiler, every part depends heavily on the other). When it compiles, it works 99% of time. Static typing/subtyping, generic package, all the time spent in the console with GNAT yelling at you really teaches you how to structure, secure and bullet proof your code. Ada really is a great teacher!