Hacker News Reader

Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

Roblox uses Lua, right?

I think Redstone in Minecraft are good examples of introduction to programming via visual programming languages. Something you can really feel and play around with. I'm not sure how Verse or Lua are integrated into their respective games but it's really hard to imagine kids being able to get into these languages without something that gives immediate visual feedback

View on HN

Minecraft redstone is a terrible example. The idea of it is great, the implementation, not so much. It's super non obvious for a lot of thing, have got behaviour that changes based on location in the world, etc... It' not uncommon for people to dive into the code to figure out how redstone works or watching tutorials from people who have done so.

The only people who can use redstone are those who just memorize the standard gates and treat them as black boxes. That's no longer redstone then, that's just normal boolean logic stuff.

Maybe I’m revealing my youth here, but I played Roblox waaaay back as a middle-schooler around 2009/2010 or so (it existed in 2006!), and it was my first introduction to programming. The Roblox editor was _rough_, but Lua probably got me interested in the field of software in the first place.

Anecdotal, yes, but based on how popular Roblox has become, I would guess that its a fine enough intro language for even the next generation of software engineers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com