Re: DigiPen Lua Club

[Steven Johnson <steve@...>]

> I go to DigiPen (http://www.digipen.edu), a school of video game programming
> and design. Since Lua is the most used programming language (other than
> C/C++) in the games industry, this is a prime topic for a club (since nearly
> all of the students have little to no knowledge of Lua, despite some student
> teams using it in their game projects).
>
> So I recently started a Lua Club at Digipen (first official meeting next
> Monday). I haven't mapped out a schedule/agenda for the class (in a test
> run, only one guy showed up and me and a friend pretty much just explained
> the ins and outs of Lua to him over a couple of hours), but I have ordered
> Lua Programming Gems (which is still on its way- I already have hard copies
> of Programming in Lua 2nd Edition and the Reference Manual) and created a
> poster (sources attached).

My associate and I are both alumni. At GDC Austin a few weeks back we spoke
with Gordon, from the school's office, and one of my questions to him was how
various non-C/C++ languages were faring there, Lua in particular. He suggested
that Python seems to be getting popular, with some teachers behind it, and Lua
has sort of receded, but his remarks were very off-the-cuff and he
didn't seem so
sure. Does that sound at all like the reality? (I imagine it's hard to
tell much beyond
your own circle, but I'm still curious.)

Mexico seems to be as Steve describes South Africa elsewhere in this thread,
without a lot of Lua presence. And in our case, we hired the other guy. :P

I did however make an incredibly lame attempt to shed some light:

A long time ago, my above-mentioned associate went to a university in Morelia to
give a talk; I got to tag along for free, on the condition that I gave
one too. I figured
something Lua-based would be a good choice, since it would be new to a lot of
the audience and I had a lot of momentum going right then building up
a framework
on top of it.

This was on a week's notice, during which time I basically threw
together a poor man's
version of Löve2D / Scrupp / et al.; then slapped a side-scroller on
top of it, featuring
a knife-armed bandit fighting floating cartoon octopi; and then, on
all of four minutes
of sleep, presented this to a bewildered student body while explaining
Lua 5.0 and
how I put it to use to make what they were seeing.

This is probably not how you should conduct Lua Club, but it was fun
all the same. :)