Mike,
Start him on Logo. It is not a children's language any more, and it was
specifically designed for simple robotics, certainly in the virtual
mode, but also in the real. I would not start my worst enemy on a
functional language like lua, however much I may like it myself. As I
have noted before, lua is subtle in ways that can be difficult to
explain by the experts who use it daily. I understand that those who
use lua as a script language avoid most of that, but you can almost
hear the screaming when they step into one of those areas. Once Logo is
mastered, then think about lua scripting, and then full blown lua.
Everett L.(Rett) Williams II
Patrick wrote:
On 07/25/2010 12:30 PM, Mike McGonagle wrote:
Hello,
A friend of mine has a 13 year old kid who is interested in Robots. I
am wanting to suggest that he learn a programming language (Lua in
particular) and learn a bit about building a computer (as Robots are
specialized computers). As Lua appears to be a language designed for
embedded systems, I was wondering if anyone out there could give me
some links to sites that deal with Robotic projects that are using
Lua, so that I could pass them along to the kid to encourage him to
learn Lua. Also, as a related topic, if there are any projects that
are dealing with AI, that would be great, too. That would be something
else for him down the road.
Thanks,
Mike
Hi Mike
Have a look at eLua:
http://www.eluaproject.net/
You could purchase a development board that it supports and then wire
it up. As Kein-Hong was saying, Pic or Stamp(or AVR) might be easier
but I have found the eLua community extremely helpful and I suspect
that a lot could be learned going down this path instead. As far as I
know, with the others you are mostly stuck with C, assembly or some
ultra niche language like processing.
I will also help if I can too.
--Patrick
P.S thanks to Peter and Andreas for answering my Linux icon question.
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