Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 11:39 AM, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> Lua's data structures are not that of the underlying computer.  It does
> not teach you what is computationally expensive, and what not.  And
> since it has only one, it does not teach you how to pick.  For that, C
> is a rather good fit

Yes, if you were teaching how computers actually work, which makes it
a good _second_ language.

> Uh, I digress.
But an entertaining comparison! Has C++ _ever_ been compared to an
accordion before?  By comparison, C is one of those little squeeze
boxes that is an essential part of Afrikaans folk music.

> Lua provides a rather well-sorted toolbox of excellent tools for solving
> programming problems.  While it severely limits your ways of tailoring
> data structures to make the best fit between problem and machine, the
> available possibilities are typically fine.

Creativity flourishes through limitation ;)

>  "Serious" programming
> nowadays heavily relies on frameworks and libraries, and those are quite
> more limiting usually and also shield you from data structure choices of
> your own.

Java frameworks always remind me of filling in forms in triplicate.

steve d.