SDL-based Lua programming environment for kids similar to Codea

Title should say it&#x27;s 13 years old and currently unmaintained.<p>BTW: a modern, maintained alternative (With Python instead of Lua) would be Pyxel (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kitao&#x2F;pyxel">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kitao&#x2F;pyxel</a> -&gt; discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40899520">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40899520</a>).

Let’s not forget P5js which has a long and esteemed history of helping to teach kids and more to program. It’s browser based so it’s compatible with every OS and requires no install. FOSS with an active community of users and contributors. I personally taught some middle schoolers with zero programming experience how to make interactive monsters in 1 hour. It was awesome!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;p5js.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;p5js.org&#x2F;</a>

Shameless plug for my own offering in this area - Kojo (15 years old and still going strong!): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kogics.net&#x2F;kojo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kogics.net&#x2F;kojo</a><p>It&#x27;s based on Scala, supports turtle (imperative) graphics, picture (functional) graphics, gaming at different levels (imperative, functional, OO), and more...

I&#x27;ve been a fan of, and a hacker of LOAD81 since antirez released it, and have put it in tons of places in order to induce hackerdom on kids and adults, alike. Its one of my favourite projects to bust out when someone tells me they want a low-impact, easy way of learning programming.<p>And since then, I&#x27;ve helped a few of those aspiring programmers become Lua gods! LOAD81 is really a gateway to a lot of wonderful things .. easy&#x2F;simple programming in Lua, to SDL .. to the Lua VM .. to exending LOAD81 .. to an introduction to antirez other cool projects (redis, lol!) and on it goes ..<p>So, thank you antirez, this is probably one of my most cloned repo&#x27;s over the years. ;) I should probably clean up some of my PR&#x27;s and give you a bit of a laugh to review, one of these days (I added sfxr for sound effects, joystick support, MIDI and a few other things along the way ..)

Anything like this should be compared to Love2D which is the gold standard. LuaJIT and lots of great libraries wrapped into extremely simple lua functions.

I learned to program in Codea since I only had access to an iPad when I was younger. I published my first game on the App Store with it and threw me into the world of Objective-C. I&#x27;m really glad to see people are still using it to learn to program.<p>To this day, I still believe it&#x27;s one of the best ways to learn to program:<p>- You&#x27;re exposed to low-level primitives instead of complicated high-level frameworks (like Unity) that abstract the fun&#x2F;educational code away.<p>- The Lua manual is arguably the best programming manual for students learning to program.<p>- Includes a built-in GLSL shader editor makes advanced graphics programming a small stepping stone.<p>- They automatically shipped in-depth examples with the app that are intentionally built for learning by reading the code.<p>- In-app docs encouraged discovering new APIs; I took it as a challenge to use all of the APIs they exposed and learned a lot in the process.<p>- No package managers, no complicated install steps, no security concerns, and a unified editor.<p>P.S. If you have an iPad and haven&#x27;t played Two Lives Left&#x27;s Crabitron [1] – it&#x27;s easily the most creative game shipped for iPad.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;se&#x2F;app&#x2F;crabitron&#x2F;id440462182?l=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;se&#x2F;app&#x2F;crabitron&#x2F;id440462182?l=en</a>

I was looking for something to teach 11-year-olds a couple of years ago, and ended up using Python with a turtle graphics library; this would have been another great alternative.<p>Programming using a language like Lua has the advantage over Scratch-like environments (which a friend suggested I use instead) that you can talk about your code more easily if it is based on keyboard entry of keywords and operators rather than GUI events (such as moving graphical blocks by drag and drop) - although that is based on my intuition rather than backed up by any empirical study (please let me know if you are aware of one to support or refute this).

the dragonruby game engine looks similar.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dragonruby.itch.io&#x2F;dragonruby-gtk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dragonruby.itch.io&#x2F;dragonruby-gtk</a>

Another programming environment for kids with its own simple programming language: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;easylang.online&#x2F;ide&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;easylang.online&#x2F;ide&#x2F;</a>

Awesome, I&#x27;m working on something similar: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lua.civboot.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lua.civboot.org</a>

Isn&#x27;t this in the spirit of LÖVE?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.love2d.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.love2d.org&#x2F;</a>

Did antirez receive any of the upsides from Redis commercialization? Or was that another group that took his code and ran with it?

What is antirez doing these days? His github history suddenly dropped to zero it seems.

Submitting kids to Lua should be considered child abuse.

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