From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!aioe.org!peer03.am4!peer.am4.highwinds-media.com!peer03.iad!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!fx40.iad.POSTED!not-for-mail Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?Re=3a_sdlada=2c_l=c3=b6ve=2c_and_programming_for_beginner?= =?UTF-8?Q?s?= Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <87tv41cnnd.fsf@samuel> From: Rick Newbie User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.4.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <87tv41cnnd.fsf@samuel> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 09 Feb 2020 17:34:16 UTC Date: Sun, 9 Feb 2020 09:34:16 -0800 X-Received-Bytes: 3151 X-Received-Body-CRC: 711918124 Xref: reader01.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:58016 Date: 2020-02-09T09:34:16-08:00 List-Id: 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