Over the last week I have had sort of a realization as you can call it.

[AnonTakesOver]

[QUOTE=Crayz;46658550]Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't start with Lua. Sure, it's easy, and you'll be scripting simple mods before you know it. But you'll also be picking up bad habits. If you read Garry's blog, you'll see that Lua is different just for the sake of being different. Because of that, you're going to be learning things that aren't implemented or practical in any programming language. You will learn the basic fundamentals (variable types, loops, functions, etc), which can just as easily be learned in almost any other language.

It doesn't matter what language you begin with, if you keep at it sooner or later you're going to pick up a new language and diversify anyways. My first language was HTML about 10 years ago. HTML didn't help me much (if at all) when I started getting into programming.

edit: "You’re teaching them that arrays start at 1 not 0." is a good example of what I'm trying to say.[/QUOTE]

If he is going to be programming games he will need to learn to adapt anyway, so Lua to C# or whatever will be good practice.

[Fourier]

Both Lua and C# are "imperative" so switching between won't be really painful.

[TSquirrel]

Thanks so much for the replies guys! (:

[proboardslol]

[url]http://www.lua.org/pil/contents.html[/url] The first edition of "programming in LUA", written by the people who invented the language, is available online for free

[awcmon]

[QUOTE=Crayz;46658109]Garry himself suggests that Lua is a bad language to practice.
[url]http://garry.tv/2014/08/16/i-fell-out-of-love-with-lua/[/url]

If you become adept in Lua and someday want to try something new, such as C# or JS, you're probably going to have a hell of time adjusting your syntax.[/QUOTE]

went from GLua to C++ myself, wasn't that fucking hard

like legit the syntax differences aren't really that much. only problem I had was getting used to trying to remember to put semi-colons at the end of everything

pointers were a bit gnarly to learn at first too, but that's not really a syntax issue? I mean, you'd have the same problems if you went from js to c++ or some shit

arrays starting at 0 vs 1? thats not something that takes 10 years to unlearn or some shit. like straight up i barely even noticed it

oh I have to use brackets instead of then and end? wow that's gonna take me about 20 years to adjust

what matters more is getting into the mindset of how to solve problems, and glua makes it both fun and easy

edit:
hell, the lessons I learned writing glua probably made my shit even BETTER. like, from GLua, i was able to get an idea of how a proper game engine works, and from that I could structure my own games that way

hell, if it weren't for glua, i might have not even bothered learning how to program at all