Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[Chris <coderight@...>]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 3:39 AM, steve donovan
<steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.  Although Pascal was a rather frustrating language at
> the time (Brian Kernighan has an interesting essay on the subject) it
> was very good when I was a recovering FORTRAN programmer. (And Scheme
> is definitely not a 'trade skill')
>
> So, in other words, does it teach the basic concepts well?  Your
> answers will help #T1.2 have a less idiosyncratic answer ;)


Personally I think the path a programmer takes depends on what their
goals are.  Business majors and such should learn Visual Basic or
similar (VBA) to start with whereas Computer Science majors should
learn C, machine language (ie. build their own CPU), and some sort of
functional language (probably in that order).

In my opinion Lua doesn't fit any of those categories.  It doesn't
have enough standard libraries (GUI, etc) for the Visual Basic-types
and it isn't low level enough for career programmers.  Lua fits in the
"other stuff" to learn after you have cut your programming teeth
(along with Perl, Python, Java, whatever).  I can't imagine using Lua
without knowing how to extend it in C.

IMHO of course.  ;)

CR