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- Subject: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?
- From: steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>
- Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:39:00 +0200
Hi all,
David M and myself were discussing the second question of the FAQ:
http://batbytes.com/luafaq/#T1.2
He thought that Lua is not that commonly used as a general purpose
language, but rather as an embedded scripting language. This is
probably true.
But the question du jour is more whether Lua can be used as a good
introduction to programming, not necessarily as a 'trade skill'. In
the same way, CS departments have variously used Pascal or Scheme for
this purpose. Although Pascal was a rather frustrating language at
the time (Brian Kernighan has an interesting essay on the subject) it
was very good when I was a recovering FORTRAN programmer. (And Scheme
is definitely not a 'trade skill')
So, in other words, does it teach the basic concepts well? Your
answers will help #T1.2 have a less idiosyncratic answer ;)
steve d.