Teaching Lua to a Perl advocate
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-09-06 23:19:32 - Graham EllisIt seems the rest of the class thinks I'll find Bill a tough case. Bill (not his real name) is a Perl fan - there's so much you can do, so shortly, in Perl. He's a great regular expression fan and he's got a real comfort with that. If you described him as a bit of a "stick in the mud" - happy with the Perly lot - I think he would (and perhaps should) see it as a compliment - for what's the point in replacing your trusty hammer when it's doing an excellent job ...?
And I'm teaching Lua. Lua's footprint is tiny compared to Perl's. It doesn't have regular expressions at all ("if we added a regular expression library, it would be bigger that the entire library we have") but rather it has an alternative pattern matching, and it doesn't have the richness of functions of Perl. If you want to do something that's a standard in Perl, you may need to write it in Lua.
So is Bill that hard-to-please delegate? Absolutely not - I'm delighted to be teaching him. Lua is indeed different - but it's different for good reasons. And when explained, and appreciated, it's good that it's different. The differences between individual languages give each their own unique strengths (and weaknesses, but we don't teach those with lots of weaknesses!). And because each has its own strengths, it means it fits in well into specific task areas.
I'm teaching Lua this week - [public course description]
I'm teaching a public Perl course next week [description].
I know both well, and I'm proud to present classes in both Lua and Perl to you!