Re: Help i'm new

[Paul Smith <paullocal@...>]

Jim White wrote:
> Thank you all for looking into this matter. As an update I have so far 
> completed the first half of the tutorial in python and am quite 
> pleased with this language. My frustration level is considerably lower 
> now that I don't spend endless amounts of time going over 
> documentation trying to gleam some knowledge that will allow me to 
> begin learning how to program. It may have been a bit ambitious for me 
> to expect this language to be a good starting point. My frustration 
> voiced in my emails and post reflect a month of absolutely no 
> progress. Right or wrong it took any pleasure out of what I considered 
> an en devour well worth undertaking. I still see it as such. I just 
> chose poorly which road to travel.
Lua isn't really meant to be a 'teaching' language. It's designed 
primarily as a programming for programmers to put into their own 
applications. So, usually all that a non-programmer would see would be 
an already installed and running application to do something else, with 
a scripting facility using Lua - such as you saw in your keyboard 
application IIRC.

This means that a lot of the documentation on lua.org is aimed at the 
typical 'market' for Lua, which is someone who is already a programmer 
and is quite technical. The 'learning to program Lua' resources 
generally assume it's already installed, since it usually is, either 
embedded inside another program, or by a techie to whom it would be all 
pretty obvious...

So, yes, I think you probably did choose the wrong starting point for 
learning to program. (Personally, I'd have probably downloaded Visual 
Studio Express C++, C# or VB depending on what you wanted)