Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[David Given <dg@...>]

steve donovan wrote:
[...]
> I remember BBC BASIC too, on the Archimedes. Fun machines.

I've still got one! Er, anyone want a very battered RISC PC?

> LOGO was cool, ahead of its time, especially with Seymour Papert's
> idea of 'a dignified mathematics for children'.

I suspect that being ahead of its time is what killed it --- it was 
fundamentally too heavyweight for the day's 8-bit micros. LOGO on the 
BBC was painful. Acornsoft LOGO came with some extremely cool demos, 
including a Prolog-light written in LOGO that I was way too young to 
appreciate at the time, but it took about five minutes to run!

So I think it got a reputation for being a toy suitable for fiddling 
around with turtles but not capable of anything more, which is a shame, 
as it's vastly more powerful than that. (It has list management 
primitives copied intact from LISP, which pretty much invented list 
processing. And, like LISP, code and data are interchangeable, which 
gave it really good introspection abilities.)

> It would not BTW be too difficult to do a Turtle Graphics environment for Lua.

I'm actually wondering whether it would be possible to do a LOGO 
pseudo-JIT in Lua, which converted code into Lua for execution 
on-the-fly. You'd need to know more about LOGO's detailed execution 
semantics than I do; if I have a sequence [FUNCTION1 arg FUNCTION2 arg 
arg] where FUNCTION1 redefines FUNCTION2 to only take one argument, what 
happens, for example?

But with that all figured out it might not be particularly hard, and 
ought to really fly... Lua is *good* at this sort of thing!

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