Re: Lua, Robotics, and a 13 year old... (No Ranting)

[Nathaniel Lewis <linux.robotdude@...>]

	I don't think I am being bad tempered, it is just that Mr. Williams II
insulted all young programmers including myself.  

	However moving on - Every language I have looked at has "gotchas".  I
have not used pbLua myself but from looking at the documentation, it is
Lua with added functions to support the NXT's hardware components.  My
Lua experience is with working with World of Warcraft and embedding the
virtual machine into the game engine I am working on.  When I played
around with the Lego Mindstorms products myself, I used Lejos, the Java
Virtual Machine ported to the RCX and NXT.  Lua does seem to be simpler
to get started with than Java so I would recommend it to someone looking
to get started with a programming language versus the graphical tools
Lego provides.  Well there is my opinion, so please no one insult me
over it.
						Nathaniel  

On Tue, 2010-07-27 at 00:01 -0400, Mike McGonagle wrote:
> Hey, wait, while I do agree that Nate is probably being a bit of a
> curmudgeon, I still would like to hear what people have to say about
> how I could give a good introduction to programming for this kid.
> While I am not a professional programmer myself, I think I have seen
> enough of other people's code and written enough code of my own that I
> can tell what is good and bad. But hey, that is not the point. I have
> also been told by a friend of mine who is a professional that some of
> my code looks better than much of the stuff that he has seen from
> other "older" (more experienced) programmers he has worked with. OK,
> but this really has nothing to do with anything about Lua.
> 
> I just think that Lua is a simple enough language, that does have some
> "gotchas" in it, but I do agree that some of those things can be
> avoided when teaching someone, only to introduce those things later
> when they are ready to move forward.
> 
> I am very interested in hearing more about pbLua, mostly because this
> 13 yo already has the Lego stuff. While I have only seen a bit of the
> development environment that comes with the NXT stuff, it does seem
> like it is geared towards doing some restrictive kinds of things (I
> could be wrong). But I am interested in seeing what pdLua can do.
> 
> I am also interested in talking about what Project Butia can do, as I
> am interested in trying to build some Arduino devices myself.
> 
> I would appreciate it if people could NOT consider this thread closed,
> as I would like to get back to discussing those things I mentioned
> above.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Mike
> 
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 9:47 PM, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo
> <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> > This thread is now officially closed so that we can go back to discussing Lua.
> >