Re: Lua, Robotics, and a 13 year old...

[Mike McGonagle <mjmogo@...>]

Thanks, this is good advice. While I wouldn't call myself a Lua
expert, I have encountered several of those "gotcha" moments with Lua,
and they can be frustrating. I also remember dealing with Logo a
number of years ago, so that might be a good place to start.

Mike

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 3:48 PM, Everett L Williams II
<rett@classicnet.net> wrote:
> 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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