Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

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

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 2:07 PM, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo
<lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> See "Bootstrapping a Forth in 40 Lines of Lua Code" by Eduardo Ochs
> in Lua Programming Gems. Also here:
>        http://angg.twu.net/miniforth-article.html

Very clever!

But (to bring us slowly back to Lua) creating an application in Lua
also involves bootstrapping.  Tables feel a little low level, admire
Python lists, write a module, and Lua has slicing and list
concatenation. Until you are writing code which fits the problem
domain better - classic embedded DSL strategy.  Obviously, Python
takes you initially further along that path, but relative to the task
of doing a big program, it's not much more work (and easily
reuseable).

On the subject of embedded DSLs, Ruby makes a virtue of allowing you
to invent new syntax. But we have enough syntax already ;)