A good way to learn Lua/any programming(indirectly)

Well, its been a long time since I've been on here but I decided to post some resources that I have found very useful, specifically if you need help learning to program. In the time that I've been gone I've taken up electronics as a hobby ie: robotics and automation. And one platform that I've used is the Arduino(micro controller) platform. The reason I bring this up here, is because the premise of a computer craft computer and an Arduino are very similar, as far as what they do: they both control inputs and outputs and can process small amounts(respectively) of data. Once again the reason I bring this up here, is because one of the parallels of ComputerCraft and Arduino is the programming, the structure is similar enough for logical inference between the Arduino C/C++ hybrid and Lua. Here is the link to Arduino's programming resources to add to your programming vocabulary. Do not use this programming style verbatim! Although Lua is like C, the syntax is different, you don't need to structure your code as much but this can help build good habits.
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For teaching programming I always felt alice was the best learning first language. It is a language devised by alice.org specifically created to teach people how to program. It is entirely made using a drag and drop interface with descriptive naming patterns and tooltips on everything that explains what each function event loop etc does. The language is also devised in a semi universal way I that no matter what language you go to after alice at least a few structural characteristics will be the same as they were in alice greatly reducing learning curves in jumping from one language to another. That being said a lot of people don't usually want to take the time to learn a purely educational language that has no real usage outside of learning.

HDeffo, on 24 March 2015 - 03:44 AM said:

For teaching programming I always felt alice was the best learning first language. It is a language devised by alice.org specifically created to teach people how to program. It is entirely made using a drag and drop interface with descriptive naming patterns and tooltips on everything that explains what each function event loop etc does. The language is also devised in a semi universal way I that no matter what language you go to after alice at least a few structural characteristics will be the same as they were in alice greatly reducing learning curves in jumping from one language to another. That being said a lot of people don't usually want to take the time to learn a purely educational language that has no real usage outside of learning.

Hence the Arduino.

HDeffo, on 24 March 2015 - 03:44 AM said:

For teaching programming I always felt alice was the best learning first language. It is a language devised by alice.org specifically created to teach people how to program. It is entirely made using a drag and drop interface with descriptive naming patterns and tooltips on everything that explains what each function event loop etc does. The language is also devised in a semi universal way I that no matter what language you go to after alice at least a few structural characteristics will be the same as they were in alice greatly reducing learning curves in jumping from one language to another. That being said a lot of people don't usually want to take the time to learn a purely educational language that has no real usage outside of learning.

I tried Alice but I feel as a first programming language it was rather annoying to learn and use. I much preferred Scratch - it's more basic, but a LOT more popular and extremely simple. From Scratch I went pretty much straight to text-based programming in Javascript, Lua (CC Lua to be precise) and Java later.

I started with GameMaker with drag and drop, and then the programming language for GameMaker: GML.
The documentation is excellent and it's really fun to make games with it.
After that, I learned C#, which is completely object-oriented.
And after that I learned Batch, Javascript, Java, C++ and Lua.

HDeffo, on 24 March 2015 - 03:44 AM said:

For teaching programming I always felt alice was the best learning first language. It is a language devised by alice.org specifically created to teach people how to program. It is entirely made using a drag and drop interface with descriptive naming patterns and tooltips on everything that explains what each function event loop etc does. The language is also devised in a semi universal way I that no matter what language you go to after alice at least a few structural characteristics will be the same as they were in alice greatly reducing learning curves in jumping from one language to another. That being said a lot of people don't usually want to take the time to learn a purely educational language that has no real usage outside of learning.

I just remembered, another good language for beginners is processing.