Ultimately I felt it was not such a fair deal for the students. Over 50% of grad CS WVU students were non-US, so they would never get to work on these Defense related stuff due to sec-clearance. Ada was also touted as a successful example of design-by-committee, which I found quite nauseating.

Are there currently any decent developer jobs in WV? I would love to move to the Greebrier County area.

Montani Semper Liberi

EDIT: Reconsidering. Ada pushes you toward the waterfall development process which can be dangerous for newbs to internalize.

Would you recommend it to others?

I initially wrote out a very long description of GW before I realized you had attended. So shortened considerably:

I went to grad school at U of Michigan and have come to the conclusion that most colleges/universities are basically the same. For such an important decision with such wide-ranging consequences, where you go to school is relatively hard to screw up. Undergraduate education is mostly foolish and cult-like behavior--Go Blue!--in a pretty setting where you can find an education and lifelong friends if you look for them. When people recommend a school they are usually recommending the cult. I went to Freshman orientation on my 18th birthday. I had been away from home a week and living down the street from the State Department and the White House when the Pentagon went boom. GW was my training ground for adulthood. The experience is so integral to who I am, to recommend it feels a bit odd.

It was before Thurston had an ethernet network. All of the other dorms seemed to have direct fiber and media converters.

1300 people in a 9 story building. Especially fun, when a block from the dorm, somebody ran over a fire hydrant, and the water supply had to be shut off for several blocks, including Thurston (there were no tank toilets). 8 hours of clogged toilets on every single floor, including the public bathrooms and study lounges.

...or the false fire alarms, where all 1300 students evacuate from only two sets of stairwells.

...or when facilities management decides it is warm enough to enable air conditioning.

Good memories. I have more, but this is enough for now.

Why do you say that? We use ada with spiral development.

The language is amazing. Most of my errors are related to copy-paste oversights (Message_1 instead of Message_2). The typing is very elegant.

Also, Java stole Ada's way of handling exceptions. Instead of try catch you have begin/exception.

It's a shame so few people use Ada. They recently converted GNAT (a free Ada compiler and a very good one) to work with lego mindstorms. It's still big in safety critical areas (transport systems - the trains in europe run ada and lots of avionics code is in ada, the medical field and if I hear correctly banks sometimes use it as well).

It takes longer to get it to compile but having no array indexing errors is so worth it.

EDIT: That said, the last thing I expected to see scanning the HN headlines today was something from gwu.edu :-P

IS this the book you guys used?