Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[David Given <dg@...>]

On 02/12/12 12:14, Jay Carlson wrote:
[...]
>> This "debate" has been going on since there *were* programming
>> languages. Logo, BASIC and now Scratch were specifically designed to
>> get youngsters into programming. *None* of the "kids' programming
>> languages" was *ever* suitable for professional software engineering.
>> Python, Lua, Visual Basic and most other languages are.
> 
> Smalltalk doesn't count?
> 
> BASIC wasn't created for kids fwiw, and a lot of its surface awfulness is fallout from needing to support teletypes. I've often wondered: knowing what we know today, what kind of programming environment would you create on a (say) 16kB RAM/16kB ROM 6502 with a memory-mapped text screen? The most frequent answer seems to be "COMAL" if you want ideas.

I think Smalltalk was just designed to be a *good* language, not just a
good language to learn --- it still a superb language even today,
although the standard library is unfashionably dated.

Also, don't knock LOGO as a general-purpose programming language.
Underneath the thin turtle graphics veneer it's a tweaked Lisp without
the parentheses.

Comal, gosh --- I haven't met that for ages! I grew up on BBC Basic,
which is very Comal-like, and grew more so as time passed... I would
have to say, though, that while it's a huge improvement over any Basic
(including BBC Basic), it's still not a good language by modern
standards. It doesn't support concepts such as structured data types or
a dynamic heap, so any attempt to build non-trivial data structures is
going to be hideously painful.

OTOH if we're mandating a machine with 16kB RAM you probably don't want
to do that much anyway. (One of the things that killed LOGO was that
most microcomputers of the day simply weren't up to running it.) And the
line number paradigm, which it inherited from Basic, does make for very
simple but effective development environments.

The best 'real' programming environment for very small constrained
machines seems to be Forth, of course. But I wouldn't wish Forth on a
beginner.

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