re: Which is better for robot control, Lua or Python?What aspects,should be considered when making such a choice?

[Foster Schucker <Foster@...>]

*  Which is better for robot control, Lua or Python?
* What aspects should be considered when making such a choice?

Let me start off with that I've been doing some kind of robot 
programming since the 70's.

I've used:ASM, BASIC, C, C++, Fortran, Lisp, Logo, Lua, Processing (now 
called Arduino) and Python.
So almost any language can be used.  But I'll stick to the 2 you asked 
about.

Your choices can be driven by two factors:
1) How well does your target robot support your language.  Are their 
libraries to support the
drive base, sensors, remote control, etc. ?  Trying to port interfaces 
to a different language is
not a fun task.  You should also look at the eco-system around the 
robot.   Things like the
use of Robot Operating System - ROS will dictate your language choices.  
Because C is supported
by most robots, you can do a Python or Lua wrapper in C and go from 
there.  It's a lot of work
to create those wrappers.

For example the FIRST Robotics Competition officially only supports a 
few languages:
C, Java and Mathlab.  A team spent a long time to build Python 
wrappers.  They released
them and about half a dozen teams use them.

2) How well do you know your language.  Trying to learn the robot part 
AND a new language
at the same time is a huge pain.   I've taught robotics classes across 
the years and I get
roboteers to write simple remote control routines first (move a 
joystick, read that value and
send it to the motor), since that's a simple follow along.

Once you get to sensors you need to think of them as events.  Limit 
switch is pushed,
sonar sensor sending values, etc.  You need to be constantly looking at 
them in a loop
and making decisions based on their values.    Both Lua and Python 
support the programming
you need to do, do you have the programming skills to be able to handle 
multiple things
happening at the same time?

While roboteers get excited about "We can now do tasks or co-routines" 
the reality is that
you can code pretty decent robot actions without them.  That lets you 
duck the fun world
of deadlocks across tasks.

Good luck!