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Ashwin Hirschi wrote:




Would not Lua be a better bet than Squeak for the
OLPC (One Laptop Per Child)? How about pointing
out Lua's educational potential to Seymour Papert?



I don't think Lua would be better suited to the project at all:
Although it's been a while since I played with Squeak, I do remember it's much more than a programming language. Next to Smalltalk it provides a nice environment to play & experiment.
This is something that definitely could be created using Lua. But unfortunately I haven't actually seen anything Lua-based that comes close... 

Has anyone else?

Ashwin.
Smalltalk/Sqeak is wonderful! I had the privilidge of being employed as a Smalltalk developer a mumber of years ago and I still think it's an awesome language.
Having said that, it's got two distinct drawbacks: it's got a HUGE footprint and the environment/apps/libraries have a quite steep and long learning curve (about a year for an experienced programmer), although the core language itself is a snap to learn.
IMO, Lua is a better choice for it's lowest level high level elegance. One can really learn OO by implementing one's own OO system, a feature not readily found elsewhere in as conprehensible a form as Lua offers.
Re: the Lua DB for this project. I think integrating Sqllite is the answer! It's not got a huge footprint and it's got quite decent performance and it leverages another development community's efforts to good effect. (NB: Sqllite has found (or will soon find) it's way into Firefox as a replacement for Sleepycat Berkeley DB.)
Speaking of Firefox, integrating Lua into Firefox would be a great thing. It could take advantage of Mozilla's platform independent system interfaces (XPCOM), XML, HTML, SVG, preemptive threads, Sqllite, etc. and obviates the need for any other sort of GUI. Applications become webpages (<script language="Lua">...</script>! Should such a device ever become available, I think it would sweep the world, let along the 3rd! I would buy one or more in a heartbeat! 

Dave LeBlanc
Seattle, WA USA