Re: Ada: A beginners experience

[blakemichael073@gmail.com]

On Saturday, July 14, 2018 at 10:53:02 AM UTC+8, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> On Friday, July 13, 2018 at 9:36:32 PM UTC-5, blakemi...@gmail.com wrote:
> > At the moment I spend too much time trying understand how to make my tools work, and not enough time
> > using my tools. 
> 
> Specifically what do you mean by “make the tools work”?  Do you spend
> 1) more time tweaking the command-line and build scripts and surrounding ecosystem, as getting exasperated trying to get the toolchain to work together (almost independent of Ada-the-language-per-se) 
> or
> 2) more time having lengthy errors/warnings-from-compiler conversations with the GNAT compiler about Ada source code, as cycles of learning of learning Ada itself?

The first of the two options, well at least most of the time. An example of the entry barrier level is the Inspirel tutorials for Ada on the Cortex-M. I have tried many times to make this work, but so far I have had no luck. (The author posts here so I will add that I have still learnt a lot from the tutorial). This is the only beginner style tutorial that I have found, but I have run into trouble with it.
 I have been able to get lights blinking on a STM32F4discovery board using the GPL-2018-community release and I am working my way through the code to truely understand it. I've been able to get some external leds flashing so I am having some success along the way. 
 I don't mind the compiler telling me off, and correcting my mistakes but fighting the toolchain, and even trying to understand the toolchain completely is hard going.
 I am determined to understand how it all works, and learning to deal with problems of building software and board support packages may simply come with the territory. But some clear documentation that doesn't make assumptions about prior knowledge would also help.

Mike Blake