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From: Rick Newbie <nuttin@nuttn.nowhere>
Subject: Re: sdlada, löve, and programming for beginners
Date: Sun, 9 Feb 2020 09:34:16 -0800
Date: 2020-02-09T09:34:16-08:00	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <soX%F.192815$ls7.64495@fx40.iad> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87tv41cnnd.fsf@samuel>

On 2/8/2020 3:40 AM, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> 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/
> 
I don't know much about those languages but I was a bit puzzled when I 
looked up if GNAT Ada supprts Rasperry a few weeks ago to see that it 
only supports an old version. It doesn't seem to be up to date with the 
hardware development. No idea if the old version can be used on the 
newer boards since I don't own one yet, but that would definitely be a 
thing that people would consider.

On the topic of teenage programmers: Although I am not a teenager I am 
new to Ada. What is repelling is when you read Barne's book and you 
throw up your arms and think: How am I ever going to master all that?!

But I guess what is true for C++ must be true for Ada as well: People 
use 20% of the language features 80% of the time. it would be good to 
find a way to introduce new programmers using these 20% to start with. 
Barne's book is simply overwhelming for the newcommer since it covers 
nearly all aspects and you can start out with much less


  parent reply	other threads:[~2020-02-09 17:34 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-02-08 11:40 sdlada, löve, and programming for beginners Ludovic Brenta
2020-02-08 12:29 ` Optikos
2020-02-09 17:34 ` Rick Newbie [this message]
2020-02-09 19:26   ` Lucretia
2020-02-09 20:01   ` Dmitry A. Kazakov
2020-02-10 14:06     ` Simon Wright
2020-02-09 22:55   ` Ludovic Brenta
2020-02-10 14:07     ` Simon Wright
2020-02-10  4:53   ` Nasser M. Abbasi
2020-02-10 10:05     ` Rick Newbie
2020-02-10 10:37       ` gautier_niouzes
2020-02-10 17:47         ` Rick Newbie
2020-02-10 14:27 ` Lucretia
2020-02-11 19:10 ` Chris Sykes
2020-02-11 19:25   ` Lucretia
2021-10-03 12:59 ` Tama McGlinn
2021-10-03 17:45 ` darek
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