Re: Recommendations on my upcoming Lua presentation?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Dirk Laurie <dpl@sun.ac.za> wrote:
> a first.  It took me several weeks to get to grips with them, and in some
> cases the grip has already slipped again because I have no need of the
> feature in question.

Ditto, and I think of myself as a language geek. As someone just said,
sometimes you have to meet a concept a couple of times, in different
contexts, and then the light goes on.

Rather than a features overview, how about making the focus 'What Lua can do'?

So use real examples of simple code that does useful things, send
email, grab a directory listing, etc. That is, leaning on the
excellent set of libraries (particularly Kepler) that are the standard
tools of any Lua programmer.

Oh, and mention performance ;)  I was running a hundred instances of a
little server last night (just for kicks) and the extra memory load
was 36 meg !  Also, the fact that LuaJIT can do numerical code almost
as fast as C definitely needs a slide with an exclamation point.

Consider if the task was to introduce C++ to people who had only done
C.  I would personally not go into templates, or even much into
classes, but demo it as higher-level C - with proper strings,
containers and exception handling.

steve d.