Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[Stephen Kellett <lua@...>]

Patrick wrote:
> Ignoring languages such as assembly and so on, I wonder if it is safe to
>   
I've found during my career (which is now well into its 3rd decade) that 
the folks that understand assembly language (for any processor, real or 
virtual) tend to understand word-size issues, truncations, pointer 
issues much better than those people that only work in high level 
languages. I can't put it any better than that, sorry, its just 
something you pick up when describing and working through issues with folks.

A similar trait also appears with relation to understanding how memory 
works - those with low level machine knowledge seem to understand the 
pitfalls of memory management and possible solutions so much better than 
those that assume having a garbage collector means they can never suffer 
from memory leaks (you wish!).

So, ignore assembly if you wish. In most cases it won't do you any harm. 
But if you do take the time to understand things at that level, you'll 
probably have some problems disolve before you later in life that would 
leave you puzzled without the slightly greater depth of your knowledge.