Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[Gavin Wraith <gavin@...>]

In message <89d273ba0909220127g7c1c3696k656c9e2721c4deec@mail.gmail.com>
you wrote:

> > But the question du jour is more whether Lua can be used as a good
> > introduction to programming, not necessarily as a 'trade skill'.

> I think Lua would be a very good first programming language,

I can only speak for myself, but I never really understood object-oriented
programming until I encountered Lua. The reason for this, I think, is
that Lua lets you maintain a reasonably accurate mental picture of
how data is structured in memory. Tables may be implemented in a
subtle way, but one can employ oversimplifications (such as blocks
of pointers) that help imagination. The fact that dot (.) and colon (:)
in Lua are syntactic sugar expressible in terms of table-lookup I
found enlightening.

-- 
Gavin Wraith (gavin@wra1th.plus.com)
Home page: http://www.wra1th.plus.com/