Recs.
Updated
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Clean and simple syntax suitable for beginners
The Lua syntax is modeled from Modula, a language known for being a fantastic introduction to programming.
The Lua syntax also has the following key characteristics:
- Semicolon as a statement separator is optional (mostly used to resolve ambiguous cases as in a = f; (g).x(a)).
- Syntactic sugar for function calls (f'string', f"string", f[[string]], and f{table}) and method calls (obj:m()).
Cons
Con Easy to make mistakes when declaring variables
When writing a function, if a programmer forgets to declare a variable, that variable will be declared at global scope. The code will seem to run fine at first, but if another function uses a variable with the same name, but fails to declare it, it will create subtle, incredibly difficult to find bugs.
Con Some concepts may not be applied to other "mainstream" programming languages
Lua features a prototye-based inheritance model. While this is also used by Javascript, it's not used by many other mainstream languages, and so some of the concepts learned while learning Lua won't be very applicable to other languages.
Another thing that makes Lua different from other programming languages, is the fact that Arrays start at 1 instead of 0. While helpful for beginners, it can complicate logic and make it very confusing when switching languages.