RE: [Proposal] Simplified Lua Reference

[Tom Becker <tom_becker@...>]

Teaching people how to program is hard. People's minds work in different ways. Some people are better with abstractions, others are better with concrete examples. People also have different life experiences, talents, and interests. There is no one right way, but rather a need for many ways to enable people to learn. Realistically, we should not expect the creators of a language to also do all the work of teaching it in all possible ways. Lua at least has good documentation explaining its principles of operation. Many languages lack that. It makes the job easier for anyone who wants to create Lua learning materials for new programmers.

Tom

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Merrell <marbux@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, September 21, 2020 12:31 PM
To: Lua mailing list <lua-l@lists.lua.org>
Subject: Re: [Proposal] Simplified Lua Reference

EXTERNAL EMAIL - Use caution opening attachments and links.

What I've suggested in the past is another version of the Reference Manual with, e.g., one section per page, with a commenting system such that people could post links to wiki pages, example code, concise tutorials, etc.

Longer tutorials that are an introduction for beginners never seem to get finished. I've run across five or so on the web that just sit there, great beginnings all but all neglected afterward.

I couldn't agree more that there is a void here that needs to be filled. Learning to program with Lua is a pain in the bohunkus if you don't come to the language with programming skills.

There seems to be an attitude on the list that skilled programmers'
documentation needs must be met but that there is no need to help those learn to use Lua who lack programming skills. Not meaning to offend, but it comes across as an elitist attitude, that Lua need not be user-friendly for the uninitiated.

My 2 cents.

Best regards,

Paul

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