AIDE

AIDE has its roots from 2002 (v0.5) to 2005 (v1.4), with an edition for Windows that was favored by the 5th edition of the LSM (Libre Software Meeting) on Bordeaux in 2004 the 8th of july. After introducing AIDE, Martin and Xavier (13 years both at this time) has explained how they learn programming in Ada with AIDE.

Let’s hear from Ludovic Brenta, a prominent and well-known member of the Ada community:

“I was most impressed by two 13-year-old youths who started learning programming in February this year, and are already Ada die-hard after playing with Python for a while, and also looking at Lisp, C and Java”.

They understand that Ada is not a fashionable language but still prefer using a good language than a fashionable one. Even more stunning, they even prefer using Emacs instead of more graphical IDEs such as GPS (previous name of GNATStudio, GPS was renamed in 2020)! They’ve written a 2000-line text-mode application in Ada that allows them to draw pictures using ASCII block characters, save them into text files, read back and display them. They designed the file format themselves, and it turns out it is quite similar to XPM.

They have a second application that uses these files to display a “Start” menu with a number of applets, one of which is a fully working calculator. The father of one of these youths, Stéphane Rivière of AIDE fame, taught them the basics of Ada during 45-minute courses on Sundays, and they did all the rest by themselves with very little supervision. After only 4 months since their first exposure to programming, they understand and routinely use separate compilation and encapsulation, and were asking me questions about multitasking and game programming in Ada!”