Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[David Manura <dm.lua@...>]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Petite Abeille wrote:
> On Sep 22, 2009, at 9:39 AM, steve donovan wrote:
>> 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.
> I, for one, totally disagree with that characterization.

Just to clarify :) I actually said "I'm not aware of that many people
using Lua as a first
general purpose language, except maybe when its embedded in an
application for a special purpose" (with emphasis on first).

I'd suspect a fair number of people using Lua standalone for general
purposes use it because they have experience in the other obvious
choices of languages but know they instead want something lean, fast,
robust, having closures/coroutines/incremental-gc, redistributable,
sandboxable, and interfaceable to C and can accept hacking and
recompiling some C code, etc.  That's not to say that Lua is
unsuitable for a newcomer though, as there are some strong (and some
weaker) points in

  acm.org - What is a Good First Programming Language?
  http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds10-4/firstlang.html