Comment by widdershins

Interesting viewpoint. It is my belief that Lua would be nice as a first language, but maybe this opinion is tainted by all my years of experience in programming. Lua definitely wasn't my first language, I started out with C/C++ and Java, long ago. Nothing beats having first-hand experience as a teacher and thus I'll accept your opinion as something more substantiated than my gut feeling.

I'm quite interested in this topic, since I would like to write a good book to introduce absolute beginners into the world of programming. I have a good and encompassing knowledge about many different languages, nevertheless I lack teaching experience.

In your opinion, which languages are good candidates as a first choice and what do you think about using a Lua game framework, like for instance Love2D to teach programming (instead of raw standalone Lua)? The idea being that instead of clunky low level awkwardness, like string manipulation, students would instead see geometrical shapes moving on a screen with just a bunch of simple and imperative statements. Would that provide a better motivation?

I remember telling my friend to start his brother on ApplesoftBasic because its batteries included, has no files or libraries, you just do some math and print and draw colored dots and lines and I trained two people like that on an Apple][ emulator with good results.

My friend was like "no way. im gonna start him with something simple like html."

Within seconds he realized he had to explain what paths were, and his brother struggled so much with them. My friend took for granted what he had already spent time learning. He was unable to guess what would be difficult to understand without priors.

Walled gardens like Processing seem to be better for education.

I would absolutely never, EVER encourage the use of a package manager when getting someone accustomed to programming. Why on earth would you do that? The problems that package managers solve are completely orthogonal to the environment of someone who hasn't even built up the intuition for basic things like flipflops, lexical scope, iteration, etc.

Downloading archives with a web browser and extracting them and just doing manual file management is vastly preferable in such an environment. That is a vastly simpler process which is impossible to break, and odds are the student will already be familiar with most of the process.

This point made me think for a while... We're so used to languages with batteries included, like for instance Python which I often compare to Lua, that we assume it's always a good feature to have. It can be, but it's not for free. We definitely become a bit lazy and often turn more into "library users" than coders. It's convenient at first sight, nevertheless a bad habit. There's so much we can learn by implementing our own versions of even the most simple algorithms. In addition to that, our solution is probably going to be leaner, even if not as feature-rich, than the library next door. But then again, we probably don't need most of those features.

I often hear this (probably because PIL is so optimistic about it), but I would say that 1-based indexing is not just a convention, it's a default that's baked into the language:

    > array = {"A", "B", "C"}
    > array[1]
    A