Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 9:36 PM, Chris <coderight@gmail.com> wrote:
> Personally I think the path a programmer takes depends on what their
> goals are.  Business majors and such should learn Visual Basic or
> similar (VBA) to start with

It's time for that old dog to die, I fear.  Java is better for them.
Getting overdependent on IDEs too early is bad, because then
Everything is a Form, the program becomes the Interface, and may look
good but inside is a mess of spaghetti.

> whereas Computer Science majors should
> learn C, machine language (ie. build their own CPU), and some sort of
> functional language (probably in that order).

There is debate about that. This is why there was a trend to use
Scheme, basically because it was _differerent_ and forced people to
think about programming, even if they had been spending their
adolescence writing games in BASIC.  Higher-level approaches to
solving problems, that sort of thing.  Some CS departments are not
into engineering ;)

> In my opinion Lua doesn't fit any of those categories.  It doesn't
> have enough standard libraries (GUI, etc) for the Visual Basic-types

wxLua is mature, and Lua can run on the JVM - plenty of libraries,
just pick an appropriate one.  (Too many choices, perhaps?)

> I can't imagine using Lua without knowing how to extend it in C.

It's not difficult to imagine that, surely?  The WoW or SciTE scripter
uses the interface as presented. But I do think that C makes an
excellent _companion_ language for Lua (much as inline assembly for C
programmers) ;)

steve d.