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> After half a year we moved on to our second language: Lua, specifically in the video game system Roblox. I almost wish we had skipped this one because it was

> After half a year we moved on to our second language: Lua, specifically in the video game system Roblox. I almost wish we had skipped this one because it was a bit too advanced for these students I wonder if they meant Lua or its integration with Roblox was too advanced. I would think Lua is a simpler and easier to learn language relative to Javascript and D.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
Lua's simplicity is a liability for someone new to programming. The tiny standard library means you need to write by hand a lot of things you could just use in another language. Arguably good for learning fundamentals, but in practice just a good way to kill momentum and smother that learning spark that is the best resource of a novice. Similarly the best way for a learner to stay motivated is to make something they are personally invested in, which usually involves integrating with something. With lua you need to get your hands into the toolchain and distribution stuff very early to do that, which has nothing to do with programming per se and is frustrating and disorienting for a newcomer. I've taught people to code from scratch and lua is a worse-than-average language for it. It's a small language but that doesn't help a total novice very much. It's the core concepts of programming that is difficult for them, not memorizing language features. The only situation where I would use it is if they have a specific motivating goal that uses it, usually yes roblox.
jay_kyburz 3y ago
My 10 year old loves programming and has a fair number of hours in Scratch and Roblox. I've noticed when messing around with Scratch, he quickly progressed from leaning the language to using the language to solve his own problems. He moved from following tutorials to creating his own games and ideas quickly. When playing with the the Roblox editor he would follow the Youtube tutorials, but never made the leap to making his own games. Roblox scripting is fairly wordy, you spend a far amount of time binding methods to long event handlers. There is a lot of text you have to type, and spell correctly, and remember. 10 year olds are very slow typists. I also spend a fair amount of time helping him fix small syntax errors which slowly sapped his enthusiasm. The drag and drop, and drop downs in Scratch really helped him move quickly from learning the language, to using the language to make games.

giraffe_lady 3y ago

Lua's simplicity is a liability for someone new to programming. The tiny standard library means you need to write by hand a lot of things you could just use in another language. Arguably good for learning fundamentals, but in practice just a good way to kill momentum and smother that learning spark that is the best resource of a novice. Similarly the best way for a learner to stay motivated is to make something they are personally invested in, which usually involves integrating with something. With lua you need to get your hands into the toolchain and distribution stuff very early to do that, which has nothing to do with programming per se and is frustrating and disorienting for a newcomer. I've taught people to code from scratch and lua is a worse-than-average language for it. It's a small language but that doesn't help a total novice very much. It's the core concepts of programming that is difficult for them, not memorizing language features. The only situation where I would use it is if they have a specific motivating goal that uses it, usually yes roblox.

jay_kyburz 3y ago

My 10 year old loves programming and has a fair number of hours in Scratch and Roblox. I've noticed when messing around with Scratch, he quickly progressed from leaning the language to using the language to solve his own problems. He moved from following tutorials to creating his own games and ideas quickly. When playing with the the Roblox editor he would follow the Youtube tutorials, but never made the leap to making his own games. Roblox scripting is fairly wordy, you spend a far amount of time binding methods to long event handlers. There is a lot of text you have to type, and spell correctly, and remember. 10 year olds are very slow typists. I also spend a fair amount of time helping him fix small syntax errors which slowly sapped his enthusiasm. The drag and drop, and drop downs in Scratch really helped him move quickly from learning the language, to using the language to make games.