RE: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

["Thijs Schreijer" <thijs@...>]

> From: lua-l-bounces@lists.lua.org [mailto:lua-l-bounces@lists.lua.org] On
> Behalf Of martinwguy
> Sent: zaterdag 1 december 2012 18:19
> 
> 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.

It always depends like martinwguy mentioned. I learned that I loved coding
on a Commodore 64, line-numbered basic that was. Fairly simple. Moved on to
C64 assembly, then found Pascal (Borland Turbo Pascal 6), and that is where
I learned most (but didn't realize till far later).
As general as it gets, before one should even consider whether to build
chess pieces or bridges, I would say try something easy, that might be Lua,
Python, or Visual Basic. Once you know you like it, learn C. Basic types,
memory allocation, pointers, everything. Might sound weird to start with C,
but a quote that triggered me from Hoelzo was; "C isn't that hard, it just
doesn't do anything for you". It really teaches how computers work. No need
to become a master at C, just do enough to touch on everything once. After
you understand how that works, any other language will just be a different
(and usually easier) way of doing the same thing.

Thijs