Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@...>]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 10:42 AM, steve donovan
<steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 3:34 PM, pan shizhu <pan.shizhu@gmail.com> wrote:
>> IMO python is by far the better language for "first programming
>> language" than Lua.
>
> That may be true, but why? Is it because it has more 'out of the box'?
>
> I like Python, and I use it because my colleagues like it, but the
> whitespace thing may confuse newbies.
>
> Plus, you have to learn about lists and dicts (with an awkward
> syntax), whereas we just have tables.

Python may be much better - for the people who will never ask "what is
an object" and "what is a class"... (*)

My impression is that there are several kinds of newbies, not just one
kind... I started programming more than 20 years ago, and I still
can't understand Python - and the whitespace/indentation thing is not
the problem. Lua at least is extremely honest - it is relatively easy
to explain tables to newbies as lists of pairs (plus a slot for the
metatable), and functions and closures are not much harder...

  Cheers,
    Eduardo Ochs
    eduardoochs@gmail.com
    http://angg.twu.net/

(*) Well, there are the standard answers for those questions, that we
all know... "everything is an object! A car is an object! A pizza is
an object! A window is an object! And every object has a class, and a
class is also an object"... I am still trying to understand why some
people seem to feel perfectly at ease with these kinds of ideas, while
I don't... Links?