Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[David Kastrup <dak@...>]

David Given <dg@cowlark.com> writes:

> In addition, it *is* a fantastic teaching language --- not for
> teaching programming, but for teaching language and compiler
> design. I'd encourage anyone with an interest in the subject to go and
> design a Forth threaded interpreter for your favourite architecture.

For every language, there are "hello, world"-like toy problems which
express the gist of a problem and are immediately obvious and
understandable.  "Programming in Lua" has a lot of those beauties.

Forth is unique in that the compiler itself is such a small entity, and
quite logical and accessable to a new user.

There is no magic which is the realm of wizards for getting something up
and working.

"I can write and bootstrap and understand my own system starting from
paper instructions" is indeed reasonably easy with Forth.

I did my implementation on a weekend with a friend, just working from
specs without code.  And we were still quite more complicated than
reference implementations (which I got to see later).

-- 
David Kastrup