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On Sep 26, 2009, at 10:18 AM, Casey Hawthorne wrote:

I'm a fan of students learning both functional and imperative
programming in a first course.

If Lua has functional aspects, then I think it would be a good choice
as a first programming language.

I'm thinking along the lines of JavaScript, which has functional
aspects and a lot of bad constructs as well.

So, if Lua or some other language could be a cleaned up JavaScript
that also runs outside the browser, that would be superb.

Lua has most of the good parts (Crockford's term) of JavaScript without most of the bad parts.

It has a few controversial items such as counting from 1 rather than 0 but that doesn't matter in a first programming language and probably makes more sense to people without a programming background. (Even a lot of mathematical material numbers sequences from 1 rather than 0.)

I've been wondering whether Corona (http://anscamobile.com/corona/) would be a good way to do introductory game programming and it's Lua based.

Mark