Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 4:12 AM, David Manura <dm.lua@math2.org> wrote:
> Just to clarify :) I actually said "I'm not aware of that many people
> using Lua as a first
> general purpose language, except maybe when its embedded in an
> application for a special purpose" (with emphasis on first).

Sorry, David, I should know better than to try to simplify a simple quote ;)

> I'd suspect a fair number of people using Lua standalone for general
> purposes use it because they have experience in the other obvious
> choices of languages

In my case, the iniitial fix came from writing Lua macros for SciTE,
and finally getting that 'scriptable editors are cool' rush that other
people seem to have got from Emacs.  At the time, my alternative
language was Boo, by the inestimable Rodrigo "Bamboo" de Oliveira
which is a statically-typed Python-like language with type inference.
But the compiler was so slow, and the name so silly. And Python itself
was not elegant, felt 'noisy', and too big and slow.  This
curiousity-about-programming-languages is common here, but not so
common in the so-called 'real world' - so I don't consider myself a
typical data point.

That paper is a good summary of PL issues with newcomers, and Lua
ticks many of the good boxes.

steve d.