Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

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

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 2:02 PM, Pierre LeMoine <yarr.luben@gmail.com> wrote:
> one Ada. Graphics and fun functions didn't come until a whole year had
> passed, when we started playing with Java, but the focus of that
> course was OO and not graphics etc. I think Lua could very well be a
> first language, it does have console input/output, just as Lisp and
> Ada ;D

It's just such _fun_ to do graphics, even if you have to use Java to get there!

Java standard graphics/Swing works very nicely with LuaJava, with a
few helper classes.  Nice tool to learn the Java platform, as opposed
to the language.  E.g. it's not too difficult to have a proper
GUI-hosted interactive interpreter (not just a 'enter and click'
interface) and then you can really boss around Swing windows.