Re: Ada: A beginners experience

[blakemichael073@gmail.com]

On Monday, July 16, 2018 at 5:25:34 PM UTC+8, fabien....@gmail.com wrote:
> On Saturday, July 14, 2018 at 4:36:32 AM UTC+2, blakemi...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Greetings,
> > 
> >  I thought that I would offer a quick beginners insights into the Ada world. 
> 
> Hi Mike,
> 
> Thanks for sharing your experience.
> 
> I work for AdaCore and I'm very interested in making embedded/bare-metal Ada easier for beginners.
> 
> For instance we have the Ada Drivers Library project [1], you didn't mention it so maybe you don't know it yet. The goal of this project is to provide drivers and support for boards like the STM32 discovery, the BBC micro:bit or the RISC-V HiFive1.
> 
> The documentation is still not good enough but we are making progress. This month I worked on documented examples for the micro:bit [2]. I think they are good for beginners, any comment would be greatly appreciated of course. 
> 
> For the learning experience, we are going to launch a new interactive learning website. Stay tuned on that, I will share the info here once it's available (hopefully this week).
> 
> You might be interested by the embedded programming competition that we organize in October: www.makewithada.org
> 
> Looking forward seeing you projects,
> 
> [1] https://github.com/AdaCore/Ada_Drivers_Library
> [2] https://github.com/AdaCore/Ada_Drivers_Library/tree/master/examples/MicroBit

Hi Fabien
I have looked at the Ada Drivers Library, and tried to work with it, though I have not had much luck. I think that I don't understand the difference between the board support packages and the drivers well enough, and where I need to be building things to access the required libraries to make much progress.
I think that Adacore choosing to support the microbit is a good idea. The microbit gives a lot of choices for how to interact with it. You can start with micropython and go on to other programming languages from there. 
Trying to understand a topic/learn something new from a distance without any experience or guidance can lead to trouble. Picking where to start is the most difficult part, every path seems equal when you know nothing. 
The advice from Dmitry seems to have been very wise and I have been able to find some really good information to get be started with either the Beaglebone Black or the Raspberry Pi. The Exploring Beaglebone Black book by Derek Molloy seems to be exactly the sort of resource that I have been looking for (there is no Ada programming, but I can add that in later with a bit of luck). There is enough information about the background Linux environment to get me started. 

Regards
Mike Blake