Lua in 100 Seconds

Lua is a lightweight dynamic scripting language often embedded into other programs like World of Warcraft and Roblox. It's minimal syntax makes it easier to learn than Python, while being much more performant than other interpreted languages.

#programming #compsci #100SecondsOfCode

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🔖 Topics Covered

What is Lua?
What is Lua used for?
Is Lua faster than Python?
Lua vs Python
Lua Basics Tutorial
How do tables work in Lua?
How to use C or C++ with Lua

[vicradon]

I love how Jeff always uses “hi mom” instead of “hello world”.

Edit: Jeff made a Twitter post about how his Mom always watched his videos and was proud of him even though she wasn't a programmer. Sadly she passed away.

My heartfelt condolences Jeff. I'm sure she in a better place seeing the great work you do for the tech community making these amazing videos. ❤

[alexandermichaud]

Being subscribed to this channel is a problem, because every day I learn about a new piece of technology I want to go play around with

[tati]

Pretty cool seeing people talk about lua, it was invented in my university and I had a class lectured by one of the creators you showed in this video!

[Ren-bobj]

Lua is one of the greatest scripting language for video game mods that I have encountered. If you're creating a game and have mods in mind as a possible feature, include Lua scripts in that mod loader, the community will make amazing things with it.

[phire]

Lua is what most likely got me into programming. I started messing around with it in Roblox back in 2010 when I was only nine and that got me into computers, now I'm a software engineer :)

[jakubsebek]

Fun fact: The PyTorch machine learning library that everyone loves is actually based on the original Torch library, built for Lua.

[Little-bird-told-me]

Lists of keywords in each launguage

ANSI COBOL 85: 357
SystemVerilog: 250 + 73 reserved system functions = 323
VHDL 2008: 115 reserved words
C#: 79 + 23 contextual = 102
F#: 64 + 8 from ocaml + 26 future = 98
C++: 82
Dart: 54
Java: 50 (48 without unused keywords const and goto)
PHP: 49
Ruby 42
JavaScript: 38 reserved words + 8 words reserved in strict mode only
Python 3.7: 35
C: 32
Python 2.7: 31
Go: 25
Elm : 25
Lua: 22
CoffeeScript: 19, not necessarily "reserved", plus ~50 to avoid from JS
Smalltalk: 6 pseudo-variables
iota: 2

[douggale]

The way you depict the arrays starting at one is perfection.

[KalleJillheden]

Lua doesn't have Regex because the Regex C library is bigger than the entire Lua compiler and runtime, including Lua's own "Lua patterns" that works like a simpler Regex.

[mikolmisol]

Lua is interesting because it's what I'd a call a "low level" scripting langauge. It's not close to the metal or anything, but it is quite flexible. It doesn't have classes, but you can implement them with function tables, metatables, or closures, each having its advantages and disadvantages. You can also implement multiple inheritance using metatable pooling. You can reuse tables to conserve memory with the table.clear() function. Iterators are simply functions that return a function for retrieving the next element of your (custom) collection.

[xyzzyx]

I knew nothing about Lua 2 months ago, but now I realize that Lua is a good complement for C language, and viceversa. Both languages work beautifully between them and when I need to code something quickly, I use Lua, but when I need more performance, I use C or C++. I wonder why I didn't learn before about Lua...

[ScotsmanRS]

Fun fact: in Scottish Gaelic, “luath” (pronounced much the same as “Lua”) means “fast”.

[felixo.]

While there are no traditional classes in lua, you should note that there is a concept called metatables that allows for object oriented programming.

[enstein]

I met lua first time in the *Computercraft* extension for Minecraft — never had so much fun coding before that.

I think this should be the first project in classes to motivate pupils für CS.

[captmcneil]

To me, Lua always felt like someone heard the "JavaScript the Good Parts" talk by Doug Crockford, and decided to make a language from it. Sometimes I wish, we had Lua in the browser.

[ariankark]

BRASIL! VOCÊ FINALMENTE CRIOU ALGO ÚTIL! OBRIGADO MEU QUERIDO PAÍS!

[f-person]

Also worth mentioning that Lua is a first-class citizen for Neovim

[dyXurChannel]

Lua has become one of my favorite programming languages. It's sheer simplicity makes writing it an absolute joy.

[SpiteAnims]

Lua is simple and easy to learn. Perfect scripting language to implement if anyone is interested

[ProfreshionalLifeBeyond]

A brilliant and thorough introduction to Lua. Thank you for your 100 second session. Much appreciated from beautiful Melbourne Australia from an ex-software engineer.