orclev comments on What's the most fun programming language to learn?

[–] cerement@slrpnk.net 8 points 9 months ago (5 children)

take a look at one of the “fantasy consoles”, can do quick scripts and see results immediately:

TIC-80 – primarily uses Lua but they’ve added in support for Ruby, JS, Moon, Fennel, Scheme, Squirrel, Wren, WASM, Janet, and Python as well
uxn – virtual machine using uxntal, a kind of Forth/assembly hybrid

for an actual language, don’t discount Lua – simple, fast, tiny – “real programmers” like to ridicule it, and yet it keeps turning up everywhere from video game scripting to text editor configuration to databases to web servers

Learn X in Y Minutes – a good introduction to a lot of languages, gives you a good idea of their look-and-feel
Rosetta Code – LOTS of languages with LOTS of code examples

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[–] orclev@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Lua to me is the language JavaScript wishes it was. It's super minimal and actually designed reasonably well. It knows what it is and isn't trying to be something else. I wouldn't want to try to write an entire app in it, but for a scripting language embedded in something else there's not a lot of languages I'd rate higher.

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[–] cerement@slrpnk.net 2 points 9 months ago

depends on how you define an app – Freewheeling Apps likes to combine Lua and LÖVE to make quick little GUI apps

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[+] ageedizzle@piefed.ca [S] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

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[–] orclev@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

Lack of advanced features like generics and a weak type system (although still better than JavaScripts type system). Its library ecosystem is also pretty anemic because it's generally assumed if you're writing Lua it's as part of a script embedded in something else and most of those won't let you pull in random Lua libraries. There are stand alone Lua interpreters that let you run Lua on its own but most people writing Lua code aren't using them and so the community to develop a rich library ecosystem isn't really there like it is in most other languages.