About Baobab

A tree. A language. A movement.

We're making programming accessible to French-speaking learners through a native French programming language and the best developer tools on the web.

Founder

Seidy KANTE

"I grew up coding in a language I had to translate in my head. Baobab is the tool I wish I had at 14. Today, French-speaking students from Conakry to Montréal can finally learn algorithms in their native language — without losing access to the modern software ecosystem."

Mission

Make programming accessible to every French-speaking learner — no translation required.

Vision

A world where the language of the learner is never the bottleneck to becoming a builder.

Open Source

The Baobab language is MIT-licensed. The IDE follows an open-core model.

Community

An open community of learners, educators and contributors — from Conakry to Montréal — building a French-first way to code.

Roadmap

From a French-first language to a full learning ecosystem.

Shipped

Language core — bidirectional Baobab ↔ Python transpiler, French-first sandboxed runtime & the bao CLI

Shipped

Baobab Studio — cloud IDE, bilingual documentation & the conformance suite (docs = contract)

Shipped

Platform & AI — API (execution, interactive WebSocket, projects, auth, billing) + agentic AI assistant (BYO + managed)

Shipped

The book — « Apprendre la programmation avec Baobab », from algorithms to OOP

Now

Reach — the bao CLI on PyPI (install & run Baobab on any machine) & a VS Code extension

In-browser execution (Pyodide) so the free tier runs client-side, plus turtle graphics & an interactive tutorial

A real parser — Lark grammar, AST & Baobab-native diagnostics (line & column) powering an editor Language Server

Later

Scale & ecosystem — classroom tools, a per-run container sandbox, a package registry & a debugger

Technology

What Baobab is built on.

Python toolchain

Next.js + TypeScript

Baobab AI

MIT open source