Re: Teach programming with LUA?

[Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@...>]

André de Leiradella wrote:
> > is someone using LUA as a programming language for
> > never-programmed-before students? Is someone experimenting it as a
> > teaching language?
> > --
> > Enrico Tassi
>
> Not yet, but I have plans to translate its keywords and the libraries' names and their functions' names to Portuguese to help my students learn algorithms. You know, not everybody in the world speaks English ;-)
>
> I hope that the dynamic typing and the associative arrays make it easier to newbies learn programming.

I have mixed feelings about this translation stuff.

You are right as manipulating more familiar words can help learning. It 
can be OK if your students just learn programming as a hobby or as 
general culture.

But if you are teaching to future professional programmers, it is not a 
so good idea:

- The number of keywords is quite small, so it isn't such a big task to 
learn them. Million of non-programmers across the world use(d) English 
Basic without too much trouble.

- Programmers have to search information, either on the docs (you have 
to translate them as well!) or on the Internet (here!). Most of this 
information (or code snippets) is written in English, which is the 
default technical language de facto.

I remember the times of 8-bit computers. Some models in France has Basic 
with French keywords. The idea didn't survived these computers...

Microsoft translated Visual Basic keywords for some languages, including 
French, mostly for VBA, probably because it targetted non-professional 
programmers using localized versions of Office.
MS when back in the later versions of Office, delivering English version 
only of VBA.
I guess it was too hard to maintain. Theoritically, you could load a 
document with French keywords into an English version of Office and make 
it run, but it had issues. And things got confusing with some versions, 
as you hit F1 to get help on a given keyword, and see the help in 
French, but about English keywords, so you had to guess the French 
version of the given parameters...

Just some informations, in case it can be useful...

--
Philippe Lhoste
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