Wrapping Up
07/27/21 07:56 Filed in: Lua
It's time to finish up my first look at Lua
I've covered the basics of using Lua in this, my, first look at the language.
Lua is a small and compact language. It is similar enough to other high-level languages to feel familiar, but there are some interesting features I had to wrap my mind around, namely tables and metatables. These are different enough from arrays and dictionaries in other languages that you have rethink your assumptions, given the syntax similarities when using Lua. I despaired, a bit, about not having real debugging facilities, but very few languages have that capability built-in. However, Lua has some nice low-level debugging primitives in the Debugger.lua module. More familiar debugging is available through various Lua development environments and editors.
Will I use Lua? Absolutely. In some ways Lua is the perfect prototyping language. Additionally, it is useful as an embedded scripting language, and I'm already using it in learning to use PICO-8, the game development environment. I'm also playing with the Codea app that uses it. Will I use Lua every day? Probably not. Swift and Python are still my go-to languages.
Lua is an easy language to learn, and I'd recommend it to starting programmers. It's much easier than Python, Ruby, or Swift.
If you've been following along with me, I hope this has been useful and fun.
This is the last post in this blog, unless I come across something new I find interesting or significant in Lua. There is more for me to learn, but I feel confident and comfortable using Lua.
—END (?)—
Conclusions
Lua is a small and compact language. It is similar enough to other high-level languages to feel familiar, but there are some interesting features I had to wrap my mind around, namely tables and metatables. These are different enough from arrays and dictionaries in other languages that you have rethink your assumptions, given the syntax similarities when using Lua. I despaired, a bit, about not having real debugging facilities, but very few languages have that capability built-in. However, Lua has some nice low-level debugging primitives in the Debugger.lua module. More familiar debugging is available through various Lua development environments and editors.
Will I use Lua? Absolutely. In some ways Lua is the perfect prototyping language. Additionally, it is useful as an embedded scripting language, and I'm already using it in learning to use PICO-8, the game development environment. I'm also playing with the Codea app that uses it. Will I use Lua every day? Probably not. Swift and Python are still my go-to languages.
Lua is an easy language to learn, and I'd recommend it to starting programmers. It's much easier than Python, Ruby, or Swift.
If you've been following along with me, I hope this has been useful and fun.
This is the last post in this blog, unless I come across something new I find interesting or significant in Lua. There is more for me to learn, but I feel confident and comfortable using Lua.
—END (?)—