On Sep 26, 2009, at 10:18 AM, Casey Hawthorne wrote:
Lua has most of the good parts (Crockford's term) of JavaScript without most of the bad parts. It has a few controversial items such as counting from 1 rather than 0 but that doesn't matter in a first programming language and probably makes more sense to people without a programming background. (Even a lot of mathematical material numbers sequences from 1 rather than 0.) I've been wondering whether Corona (http://anscamobile.com/corona/) would be a good way to do introductory game programming and it's Lua based.I'm a fan of students learning both functional and imperative programming in a first course. If Lua has functional aspects, then I think it would be a good choice as a first programming language. I'm thinking along the lines of JavaScript, which has functional aspects and a lot of bad constructs as well. So, if Lua or some other language could be a cleaned up JavaScript that also runs outside the browser, that would be superb.
Mark