That was lovely. I always had a hard time wrapping my head around the exact behavior of metatables when I messed with Lua a few years back. Thanks!
Learn Lua in 15 Minutes
11–20 of 99 posts
Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes
#12This is awesome. On that note, I don't understand all the javascript craze. Lua has been around for quite some time, and it's small, with well-defined semantics, a nice set of features, the interpreter is small and very fast, you can get even faster with LuaJIT, etc. Browsers should have adopted that ages ago.
Yeah, I see Lua in many ways as "JavaScript done right".
I also found it considerably easier to integrate than something like V8, and it appears to be easier to use for non-programmers.
It definitely deserves to be more popular.
Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes
#13Obligatory:
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years — http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes
#14Along the same lines is http://hyperpolyglot.org/ (which has been posted here a few times). This is useful both for learning a new language and for a quick reference for languages you're not so hot on. It's also very interesting to compare similarities and how languages have influenced each other.
It seems (from the comments here and my own experience) that many people really like this style of learning. It would be great to see it applied in more areas.
Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes
#15I would like to say that the easiest way for me to learn lua really fast was to build games with Corona using lua. Having a great tool that gives great feedback right away makes learning a language more fun IMO.
I got my feet wet with Lua by writing custom OSC handlers for Renoise.
There were the expected "WTF?" moments but having something running and doing something practical is a great motivator.
Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes
#16I love this - if every language could have something like this written up it would be amazing. It just about fits into my attention span!
Well, it helps a lot that Lua is by design a very small language :) Python is actually much bigger nowadays -- I would challenge someone to come up with something this simple that doesn't leave out a lot of stuff you will encounter in real code. The extra features ("bloat") do matter. I like the idea of Lua a lot, but when I started programming in it, it unfortunately felt like a less capable Python to me.
Lua and Javascript are quite similar in that way: nice little languages that fall apart really quickly when you try building anything reasonably large or complex.
I don't really understand the attraction, except in certain niches like Lua as an embedded scripting engine, when you really need something that can be trivially sandboxed.
Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes
#17This is awesome. On that note, I don't understand all the javascript craze. Lua has been around for quite some time, and it's small, with well-defined semantics, a nice set of features, the interpreter is small and very fast, you can get even faster with LuaJIT, etc. Browsers should have adopted that ages ago.
> On that note, I don't understand all the javascript craze. ... Browsers should have adopted that ages ago.
Someone still has to actually do the work. Then it has to get adoption. No one has bothered to do either.
Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes
#18I love this - if every language could have something like this written up it would be amazing. It just about fits into my attention span!
Well, it helps a lot that Lua is by design a very small language :) Python is actually much bigger nowadays -- I would challenge someone to come up with something this simple that doesn't leave out a lot of stuff you will encounter in real code. The extra features ("bloat") do matter. I like the idea of Lua a lot, but when I started programming in it, it unfortunately felt like a less capable Python to me.
I'm sure you're aware of Penlight, which does a very nice job of providing a "batteries included" library similar to Python's for Lua.
Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes
#19This is awesome. On that note, I don't understand all the javascript craze. Lua has been around for quite some time, and it's small, with well-defined semantics, a nice set of features, the interpreter is small and very fast, you can get even faster with LuaJIT, etc. Browsers should have adopted that ages ago.
Because it indexes from 1 and doesn't use braces? (semi-sarcastic)
Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes
#20This is a neat little reference but I can't waste the opportunity.
I've seen people say they've never seen complaints about fonts being too big? Well here I am, complaining that the fonts are so big this page is hard for me to read without zooming out.