Learn Lua in 15 Minutes

#1

Post by tylerneylon » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 8:05 PM UTC

Learn Lua in 15 Minutes
tylerneylon.com

Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes

#2

Post by lukefreiler » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 8:40 PM UTC

I love this. I'd like/pay to have a consistent library of exactly this for other languages.

Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes

#3

Post by digitalsushi » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 8:50 PM UTC

Thanks! Lua is used all over the place in wireshark user scripts. This is super useful.

Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes

#4

Post by programminggeek » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 8:51 PM UTC

I 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.

Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes

#5

Post by digitalsushi » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 8:52 PM UTC

lukefreiler wrote: post #2

I love this. I'd like/pay to have a consistent library of exactly this for other languages.

A scripting language rosetta stone.

Here's one

http://www.lurklurk.org/rosetta.html

Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes

#6

Post by karpathy » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 8:59 PM UTC

This is awesome. I will take [a single huge list of self-explanatory example snippets (with a few short comments here and there) for 95% of use cases] over [detailed walls-of-text docs pages spread across a hierarchy of topics] any day.

Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes

#7

Post by potomak » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 9:02 PM UTC

programminggeek wrote: post #4

I 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.

Almost the same experience but with Love2D[1] instead of Corona.

After learning Lua I also suggest to take a look at MoonScript[2] a dynamic scripting language that compiles into Lua, you can think about it as the CoffeeScript of Lua.

[1] http://love2d.org/

[2] http://moonscript.org/

Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes

#8

Post by piqufoh » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 9:09 PM UTC

I love this - if every language could have something like this written up it would be amazing. It just about fits into my attention span!

Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes

#9

Post by chubot » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 9:21 PM UTC

piqufoh wrote: post #8

I 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.

Re: Learn Lua in 15 Minutes

#10

Post by outworlder » Mon, Jun 24, 2013, 9:22 PM UTC

This 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.