Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[martinwguy <martinwguy@...>]

On 1 December 2012 17:04, Just4n <n0m4d@gmx.us> wrote:
> Does anyone on this list know folks that teach CS or related topics -
> perhaps they'd have some useful feedback on which things the "average"
> (whatever that is) person struggles with when learning a language.

I taught Computer Science at a UK university.
We were forced to teach Pascal, and the students wasted most time
getting the semicolons in the right places, as they are statement
separators, not terminators, and you need to put one at the end of
every line *except* the last one of each begin-end block.

First and foremost, the choice of first programming langauge depends
mostly on which language is the teacher's current favourite - since a
well-explained enthusiastic course for an awful language will always
outshine a lack-lustre course given by someone who doesn't love that
language, however zippy it may be in its own right.

If, instead, the teachers are well-versed in a wide range of languages
and do not have strong personal bias, then the choice can reflect the
kind of problems the beginner wants to solve first: to write plugins
for World of Warcraft, to control lights and stepper motors from an
embedded board,
to write dynamic web pages, to process big files of text, to solve
complex mathematical problems, to create electronic musical
instruments or whatever.

After all, every language has its features - you just trade one set of
weirdnesses for another, and as a beginner all the strangenesses are
more of less equally strange. In Pascal they'll be fighting the
semicolons. In Python the layout (they say...)

People often ask me which programming language they should learn
first, and I always reply "It depends. What do you want to do? It's
like you are ask me how to work wood, but I don't know whether you
want to make chess sets or to build bridges."

   M