Nathaniel,
You aren't even representative of most regular programmers, much less
representative of most 13 year olds, and you haven't the social
knowledge to know that you aren't typical or even reasonable in this
case. I am glad that you can do these things, but I would hate to get
hold of code that you have written, not because it won't be good or
even genius, but because it is likely that you are the only one that
will be able to work with the code. When you program in the way that
you describe at the age you describe, it is more like a tropism than it
is organized behavior. I wouldn't wish having C++ as a native language
on my worst enemy. It is a monstrous kluge, allowing at least a dozen
ways to do almost anything, and many times completely unreadable by
anyone but the author, and often not by the author after any reasonable
time away from the code. I remember being an Assembler code guru in IBM
360/370 code, but it did not take me long to figure out that writing
Assembler was a self-defeating exercise. Without the most careful of
techniques, C++ can be the same thing. As with writing Assembler on
modern machines with dynamic register sets, very few people can write
code that is as efficient as a good compiler, especially not for more
than a few lines. I suspect that eventually, things like C++ will fall
into that same category. You will note that one of the chief
difficulties in making any language such as lua relevant is finding
ways to wrap all the junk that is out there in C and C++. As a result,
programming is stuck in a rut around C and C++, and hardware is getting
far ahead of software just because of those issues. I don't doubt that
your facility in such things will make you highly employable in the
present and the near future, but it will not help increase the ease or
even the efficiency of implementing ideas in programs. Languages like
lua need to be bootstrapped in themselves, and need tools to
automatically and efficiently wrap the various pieces of C/C++ that
must be dealt with to get things done. In the meantime, the tendency to
make lua an appendage of C++ is, IMO, something that should be
discouraged.
Everett L.(Rett) Williams II
Nathaniel Lewis wrote:
It all depends on how hard the kid is going to try honestly. I am 17
and I had been programming AVRs in C++ for two years at 13. Also what
kind of platforms are you going to be using? I saw NXT, and there is
pbLua for it. What others were you thinking of? AVR, PIC, other?
Nathaniel
On Mon, 2010-07-26 at 01:16 +0800, KHMan wrote:
Mike McGonagle wrote:
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.
It's the wrong "embedded", I think. Lua's emphasis is on embedding
into software programs, e.g. like VisualBasic in Excel or Word,
but much better. Not the hardware embedded as in MCUs.
There are Lua for microcontrollers, but they are not really
13-year-old-proof.
So there's the no-brainer Lego stuff. But cheap servos are so very
attractive these days, however going the non-nicely-packaged route
would be a bit more difficult, though there are things like
Arduino or a BASIC-based board to make things easier.
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