Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[Florian Weimer <fw@...>]

* steve donovan:

> But the question du jour is more whether Lua can be used as a good
> introduction to programming, not necessarily as a 'trade skill'.  In
> the same way, CS departments have variously used Pascal or Scheme for
> this purpose.

I think the main criterion is availability of introductory texts.
Without that, creating a course will be a lot of work.  (I found
Programming in Lua an extremely inspiring read, but it's probably not
that helpful to absolute beginners.)

The language itself is fit for the purpose, I think.  The syntax error
messages are not too bad, either (bad mesages can be very off-putting
when you're struggling with a programming language for the first
time).  But the default, non-strict mode would be unnecessarily
confusing, I fear.