Re: [mildly OT] Some info about Python

[Paul K <paul@...>]

> Promoting a beginner-friendly Lua IDE, even if it's not suitable for professional use, is going to be the biggest step we could take towards making it easy for novices to get started with Lua development on Windows.

I may be biased in my assessment, but I did run several semester-long
classes for high school students that were new to Lua and programming
in general using ZeroBrane Studio IDE and none of them had problems
using it in class or on their own. It's also mentioned on the Getting
Started page (https://www.lua.org/start.html).

> I wonder why nobody mentioned LuaDist yet? Go to http://luadist.org/, download a lua+bootstrap zip for your platform (Linux, Mac, Windows), extract somewhere, boom, you have Lua plus a large selection of libraries: https://pastebin.com/WNDXux9W

I second this. I looked at integrating LuaDist or LuaRocks with
ZeroBrane Studio 6 years ago and picked LuaDist for two reasons: it
provides binary distributions (although it also supports building from
source) and it can be integrated using git, lfs, and luasocket
libraries (some other pros and cons are listed here:
http://notebook.kulchenko.com/zerobrane/lua-package-managers-luadist-luarocks-and-integration-with-zerobrane-studio).
One can run `luadist.install('penlight')` command from ZeroBrane
Studio (assuming LuaDist package is already installed, which is just a
lua file) and get penlight library installed and available for use.
This also works for any other library in LuaDist repo.

There are definitely limitations to what LuaDist does, but those are
primarily related to modules not being refreshed and binaries not
updated for Lua 5.3.

Paul.