On Saturday, February 8, 2020 at 12:41:01 PM UTC+1, Ludovic Brenta wrote:

I have a 14-year-old son whom I teach programming to.
This framework makes it very easy to have immediate results... but
Lua lacks strong typing and in particular range checking, and a debugger.

Perhaps you will find AdaBots[1] interesting. It happens also to be a 'binding' from Ada to lua, in the sense that it leverages the already existing lua interpreter built into ComputerCraft[2], and the world already provided by Minecraft. This makes it
quite easy to think of interesting challenges without having to program that whole world; e.g. help I'm stuck at the bottom of a well, have the turtle build me a staircase back to the surface.

[1] https://github.com/TamaMcGlinn/AdaBots
[2] https://tweaked.cc/

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On Saturday, 8 February 2020 at 12:41:01 UTC+1, 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/

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

Hi Ludovic,
there could be an alternative for teaching kids programming. Have a look at Object Oriented Turing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_(programming_language)).
Strong typed, with a simple syntax, and powerful constructs. The language was used at University of Toronto, and in high schools in Ontario.

The only drawback is that the system is no longer maintained.

- Object Oriented Turing Reference:
http://compsci.ca/holtsoft/OOTRef.pdf
- Introduction to Programming in Turing:
http://compsci.ca/holtsoft/IPT.pdf
- The environment:
http://tristan.hume.ca/openturing/
- ... and more here ...
http://compsci.ca/holtsoft/

Regards,
Darek

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