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From: Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: sdlada, =?utf-8?Q?l=C3=B6ve=2C?= and programming for beginners
Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2020 12:40:54 +0100
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Date: 2020-02-08T12:40:54+01:00
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Hello.

At FOSDEM, my colleague Thomas Maluszycki gave a talk[1] about rapid
application development in Ada.  This made me think.  You see, I have a
14-year-old son whom I teach programming to.  He is lukewarm about it
but I think it is my duty as a parent to give him basic education in
this field, as computers are already everywhere and will probably govern
his live even more than ours.  So I played with him with Colobot[2],
taught him a little bit of Ada (with the French translation of Barnes'
book for Ada 95), a little bit of ZX Spectrum BASIC, and now he's
writing a Pong clone with the LÖVE framework[3], in Lua[4].  This
framework makes it very easy to have immediate results...  but Lua lacks
strong typing and in particular range checking, and a debugger.

So it occurred to me that LÖVE is really a Lua binding to SDL plus a
predefined event loop, and that it would be quite easy to do something
similar based on the sdlada thick binding.  The goal would be to attract
teenage programmers to the language and to programming in general.
Possibly on a Raspberry Pi.  I'd be willing to make a Debian package for
it.  What do you think?

[1] https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/ada_rad/
[2] http://colobot.info/
[3] http://love2d.org/
[4] https://www.lua.org/

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.
The partners leverage consumer-facing potentials.