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. ❤
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.
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.
I love lua's simple and elegant syntax, like # to get the length, its simple for loop, etc However it lakes a lot of useful stuff, like math constants PI and Euler etc. A short spread operator, instead you have to use table.unpack To print a table you need to unpack it first, print(table.unpack(my_table)) I wish lua or luau had these functions so that i could use it form my data science projects
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 :)
The best thing about Lua is that its devs are academics who have been working on it for a very long time now. They think really hard about whether new features are useful, and go to a lot of trouble to implement features in a coherent and efficient way. In other words, their main focus is creating a good language rather than a popular language.
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.
@@gamemoves2415 This is actually a nicely written collection of things that make lua great. I care and I like this quality comment. Back to Lua: Integrating it as a dynamic configuration is also super easy and really flexible. And with LuaJIT the Lua code/configuration can also yield really fast machine code.
@@philippjungkamp3760 so what? Not like anyone is going to use every you've written. If they need lua information they are certainly not coming to an obscure comment. Everyone is going to Google.
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.
First time I heard about lua when I thought about switching vscode by nvim and found out plenty of nvim plugins are written in lua. That was a barrier for me 'cause I really didn't want to spend a lot of time learing new language just to use nvim properly. But just this one small video makes me feel it's not that scary to go into lua. Thank you Jeff for your videos they're really inspiring
I know this comment it a year old, but for others: You will literally learn Lua naturally without even trying just by taking the time to configure neovim how you like it. Assuming you have some very minimal programming experience in any language, you can just dive in, you will figure it out as you go without once ever reading the Lua docs.
I agree it's greatly underrated. Its flexibility is amazing. I've hopped around through many languages over the past 15 years, never really feeling comfortable about any. I tried Lua some 4 years ago, and at first I struggled a bit with the 1-indexing, but it didn't take long for me to really settle for it. Coding in Lua is a breeze. I only stopped for about a year because I thought it wasn't fast enough for my gaming projects, but eventually I went back and I found out it was just my bad implementation being bad. Lua, at least with LOVE/LuaJIT, is actually really fast. Lua being a simple language is also a plus. When I got back to it after that long pause, I still remembered almost everything about it. And it's also the one language I can go for days or even weeks without needing to check something in its documentation.
man lua is so fucking fast. learning to work around the JIT's nuance + storing data in c types will give you ungodly performance you would not believe. People really dont understand how fast this language can get. Those benchmarks showing near C and sometimes faster than C speeds are real.
I agree on lua's flexibility and simplicity, in lua everything just feels really straight forward, i feel like my only limit is the speed of my hands and the language is fast, where as in other languages i feel like i have to do roundabout techniques to get what i want, also lua's first class functions are a huge plus, its painful for me to use a language without first class functions at this point. Edit: also tables and metatables really deserve more credit, they can do the job of what in other languages you'd have like 4+ things to do it, for example tables can function as: arrays, dictionaries, structs, enums, etc.. and if you learn metatables (easier than they seem) you can emulate classes if you really wanted to, but because of how unbelievably flexible lua ls you wont even feel like you need to, its honestly really sad how it stagnated
I also love lua for how common it is in sandbox games Be it Roblox (how I discovered it), Gmod, ComputerCraft, you name it. Its quite common in that niche.
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...
And sorry about Python fans, but I learnt more Lua in 1 week that what I learnt about Python in 1 year... I feel Python is becoming complex and clumsy about its syntax and program complexity...
ain't no way it's this easy, i thought i would need to somehow store 5 hours worth of information in my brain to get it, then this dude shows up with two and a half minutes of info and i can now understand it
Computercraft is a populair Minecraft mod that adds programmable blocks and drones (turtles) into the game, it uses Lua as their scripting language and it's how I got in contact with programming for the first time.
Computercraft is wild. Played a modpack a year ago and needed something to dig. Didn't have the patience to learn Lua for it, but going through the scripts of others and fixing bugs was really fun
It was my first language to deal with, I modded so much things on old Gmod servers in Lua, most of the CS:S and OrangeBox games (based on Source 1 before the BIG source 1 update that killed 120 tick servers...) used Lua to give the community the ability to create plugins ! Loved this one Jeff, thanks for the memories :)
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.
I met this mod on my first steps into programming too! I remember it was possible to use turtles to craft banned stuff like chunk anchors or run thru residences to siphon chests. Oh man I would love to go back and explore that mod for the first time again (I am sorry to whoever I griefed that one day)
@@Taaz2 Came to talk about my ComputerCraft experience and found somebody who did exactly what I did. I would steal from chests with wireless turtles and it's probably the peak of my minecraft career
Lua is close to being my favourite programming language, especially when it comes to game dev, it is what encouraged me to continue making those types tutorials, since doing it in Lua is quite fun
You are giving me some encouragement to finally sit down and try learning a new language and get back to programming. Question, does LUA only work with C, or it can work with other languages too? Is there a downside to doing that?
i have learned lua for 5+ years, and all those 5 years were on roblox by this point i have basically mastered lua and wanted to go to other languages like c# and c++, then my lua brain broke when i saw their syntax.
@@AkshayKumarX You can use Lua on its own as well! I'm not really sure if Lua works with other languages, but most languages will have some sort of library that will allow you to execute it in some way ;)
Every time I watch one of these 100s videos, I makes me want to diver right into what ever it's about. Most of the time lol. Lua seems very interesting. Great video
Lua does have classes (though it doesn't do them the same way python for example does), they can be created via a metatable and they support inheritance, object values, the self keyword and just about anything else you can think of. Thanks to the colon operator closely followed by the self keyword, it's obviously an intended feature rather than something that can be simulated.
@@mikumikudice It's pretty much what I meant since I added it right after that point, not to mention that self in Lua cannot be used outside of a function with colon notation, but regardless thank you for the correction.
So glad I came across this language a while ago, becuase of this video! I like the extreme portability and simplicity. Making games and desktop apps (that don't need to be super secure, or don't need to cummunicate with a lot of outside devices (printers, routers etc.)) with this language is pretty painless and straight foreward.
neovim was created by a brazilian (Thiago de Arruda), so is the second (maybe there are more) useful thing created in Brazil, and curiously, neovim uses Lua for plug-in creation and configuration. Edit: Elixir is also created by a brazilian, so Lua is definitely not the only useful thing created by them.
Some time ago I wanted to contribute to an open source program. For this I had to learn LUA. I really started to love it for it being so simple yet so powerful.
You can define dictionary tables without the `["index"]` syntax. That is only required for using non-standard names (like ones containing special characters) or when the key you want to assign something to is dynamic (for example, you want to assign specific keys from a loop, but you don't know the key name at that point). This syntax works as well (and from what I understand, seems to be the convention): `local t = { x = 4, y = 2 }`. You can also access table fields both using `varname["key"]` and a more "object"-asque syntax with `varname.key`.
Exactly. Roblox even _encourages_ using object-style syntax with tables (if the key is a valid variable name, just alphanumerics and no spaces, you're golden for nesting keys as far as you want, and in fact that's literally how accessing game objects in the DataModel natively works, they're functionally just tables inside tables). I got quite good at scripting back when I was still interested in the game, and even made a few ModuleScripts (libraries) for referencing Terrain voxels (which natively have to be accessed using stud coordinates for some reason???) using more reasonable "one voxel, one index over" coordinates, aka how Minecraft and literally all other voxel engines read and write their data structures...
Ugh, now I'm getting docked hipster points for my preferred language being covered on this channel! ;) Understandable omitting the use of metamethods & metatables given the 100 second overview, but they are a very powerful concept that allow you to (amongst other things) write in an object-oriented manner also. Definitely worthwhile exploring for any folks interested in picking up Lua
Eu programo em Lua já alguns anos e sempre enjeto código C no meio. Fica super legal para os propósitos que eu preciso, aínda mais para sistemas de embarcação!
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.
Lua was my first real language, but for doing certain things I learned some other languages, because I assumed that since those languages are more popular, they must be better; now you have blown my mind.
I've heard of Lua once when I was in college, didn't think too much of it. Watching this video has piqued my interest again -- insanely awesome! I think it's incredibly powerful, that Lua has a C API that allows developers to run Lua code in a C program, and vice versa. Great -- how am I suppose to get my work for the day done now? 😂
But be aware that although the "run Lua code in a C Program" part is very easy to do, the "run C program in lua code" will require a lot of binding work.
about running C inside an interpreted language is nothing new really, most language has support to it, Ruby for example has a lot of libs(gems) that uses C to speed up the code
@@victor95pc It's called FFI (foreign function interface). This technology is present in all jit (just in time) compilers of various languages (see JNA for Java or cffi in python/pypy). It binds at runtime instead of compile-time so calling bound functions is a bit slower.
Sometimes I just wish there was more than 1 channel like fireship, or more jeffs/people running fireship to produce more high quality videos and tutorials on every technology
This vid came at the perfect time for me. Since I'm just starting to work my way up to building a working config in neovim - and need to learn just enough lua to get by. I knew next to nothing about lua except for the array indexing weirdness, and now I have a much better grasp of the 'Lua Philosophy' now. Thanks Mr. Ship!
I suppose it's worth noting that you can in practice use tables with zero indexing, with the caveat that you compensate for it in *for* loops (e.g. subtract 1 from the limit, as in *for i=0, width-1 do)* and keep in mind you shouldn't rely on *#* to get the length of that table, because *#* doesn't take the index 0 into account (or else keep in mind the length of the table will be *#table** + 1).* This is usually not a problem, though. When I started out in Lua I found it a bit confusing to know when I should use 1 and when I could safely use 0, but it didn't take much time to get it figured out.
Back when I was still first learning programming I got super burnt out on C/C++ over the years. Lua was the language that reignited my love for programming and games development. It can be such a joy to use!
Same history: I started to learn programming with C++ and it was hard. I mean, got many of the concepts of programming, but it wasn't funny. Then, I wanted to learn how to make games in Roblox and win money and I got to learn Lua. Now I don't make Roblox games, but I use Lua for pretty much any programming task I want.
0:05 21 keywords (reserve words) vs 33 0:16 Virtual machine matches closely to the C language 0:38 1 Data Structuring Mechanism called a { Table } 0:45 Multi tasking with coroutine 1:00 Dynamic typing
LUA was really fun to learn when I was making WoW mods. It became a meme at my company where I would suggest we rewrite the front end of our entire application library in LUA at almost every standup meeting ha
I use Awesome window manager as daily driver in my debian machine, which is fully written in Lua. So I had to learn a little bit of it in order to customize my desktop to my linking. I found it super easy to get my head around quickly and had a lot of fun configuring (after coming from Qtile which is written in Python).
I really like functional programming. At the moment I am really loving Elixir. I hope you can cover it in the near future. Thank you for all your GREAT content!!!
@@ChristophBackhaus I think that functional programming goes well with object-oriented programmming. Scala is an example of that. Such style is possible even in Java with streams, records and some elements of pattern matching, but it's annoying there because streams are single-use and there needs to be a lot of boilerplate.
Funnily enough I learned Lua when I was an admin on a Wikia (now Fandom) site. Did some cool stuff with it, like parsing a bespoke record format I created to draw tables, which is nigh impossible with wiki markup. Things went sideways and I left but the things I learned on the Mediawiki environment I'd always cherish. Lua being the scripting language of choice of many programs like VLC and Garry's Mod makes it easy for me to dip my toes into them too, as I approach them as a returning Lua coder instead.
My first encounter with Lua was on roblox, I was probably only 9 or 10 at the time but even at that age I was able to grasp the absolute basics, that's how simple Lua is. A few years after that I attempted to get into minecraft modding, but the absurd amount of work required to just do anything in Java immediately made me gave up because it was so much more fun to use Lua and especially roblox's engine which basically makes the barrier of entry to being a gamedev absolutely non-existent.
ive been a scripter in lua for around 2 years and im suprised that i was still able to learn new things from a very short video on something i am already very experienced at
I started with lua, making games on ROBLOX. I now do lua and python, (lua due to Roblox and python due to GCSE computer science), and I have to say I do enjoy lua more. It's syntax is very easy to pick up
Lua is a bad first language if you are not doing it for fun or planning on doing video game development. It teaches you bad habits and is very different from the majority of "real world" applications.
@Fireship, do Django in 100 seconds! Lua is completely underrated. I played around with it to show my kids how to build their own Roblox games, and it was a joy to work with.
I'm currently learning lua right now due to a current order I have. I hope I am able to finish the order in time! Lezzgo. Thanks for this brief description Jeff. As far as I know, Lua's performance is faster than python but python has more standard library. Both are dynamically typed though.
damn, i didn't know it was this simple. I think my imagination was overcomplicating it because of all the objects and things in Roblox studio, but the language itself is pretty easy, thanks for giving me a new POV.
This language looks cool actually. Lua can be found in most industrial embedded devices like sensors, PLC, and HMI development toolkit. I still don’t get why it is so underrated.
@@iamunamed5800 LUA is intended to be a simplest-but-functional scripting language to be added to your C program. It is not self-sufficient by design. LUA must drop this simplicity principle to be able to become self-sufficient and be able to compete with python. It will effectively prevent LUA being LUA.
I used lua for my game's scripting language (the engine is written in C++) and it made letting other less coder devs get involved in the coding and make useful functions without having to understand the nasty engine stuff. It has been great. I really love how simple it is while retaining a c-like syntax. My only complaint is that it indexes at 1, only thing I'd really want to change about it is make it index at 0, like every other normal language. Everything else is pretty intuitive and sensible. Would highly recommend using it as a scripting language for a game, but don't have much experience using it for other things.
lua was one of the first languages that i tippied my toes on when i was 12, i got inspired by roblox games and i wanted to make one myself, and it didn't work out
I'd love to see a video about fp-ts library for functional programming in typescript. It (un)suprisingly gains a lot of traction right now, at least in terms of npm downloads per week.
I'd also add that lua has proper tail call recursion, so you can use functional paradigms without bloating your stack (yes I'm looking at you python) - and this was before funcional programming was hip.
'dynamic language' and 'no type annotations are required' are two different things. You can write a C++ program always using auto etc. but it still isn't dynamically typed.
Fun fact, you can put functions within tables to mimic classes, you can even use a special metatable keyword in a for loop to create new copies of the class. All my years of programming games in Defold are paying off 😂
You can also create an index on a table just giving the key name and value: *local foo = { bar = 1 };* *print(foo.bar);* PS: *local* is practically mandatory in terms of best practices.
His showing true right way to create dicts! `local foo = { for = 1 }` - unexpected symbol error `local foo {["for"] = 1}` - works always fine! Never do bad code!
First introduction to Lua for me was World of Warcraft modding, but nowadays I use it only for programming stuff in modded Minecraft (CCTweaked, OpenComputers). Oh how I despise meta tables though. I've been doing OOP for so long that my brain is wired to think in classes. It's a neat language though, as long as you're open to think a bit differently.
im glad word is getting out about lua being underrated. people think its just a bad kids programming language because its used to make roblox games, but its so much more
I spent much of my childhood playing with lua in first Roblox, then Garry's mod and World of Warcraft. It might even be the main reason I study cs today.
as someone who has been learning game dev on roblox for a while n is taking a cs class where python is being taught i can guarantee that lua is so much easier to learn
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
ngl you had us in the first half xD
i litteraly have a txt file where i keep a list of technologies i want to play around with later, 90% come from this channel lmao
@@joseph0x45 That's a pretty handy idea, I'll remember to do that!
Just print hello world and add that programming language into your resume
@@DogeMultiverse I can see why that's your profile name 😂
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. ❤
Same thing, because she is his world
@@bigoulie931 Maybe because of hava.
I wonder if he does this because his mom watches every video he puts out, so he is saying hi knowing this
So cute
Is name is Jeff? Well today I just learned TWO things!
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!
You're one lucky guy!
wow, that's amazing! please tell that lecturer that one more person out there absolutely loves the language they designed
Awesome! I’ve been using lua in mach4 on my homemade cnc router. It’s cool.
wait what
so that means if your university didn't exist roblox would not even be a thing lol
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.
hades 2 for example
The Minetest Engine also uses Lua to code mods for it.
I am currently trying to learn Lua to make some mods for it :)
Factorio mods are done in large part through Lua, I believe!
GTA V modding has a lot of Lua scripts as well. Personally trying to use it to tinker with awesomeWM.
add celeste to that, i believe it uses lua for mods too
The way you depict the arrays starting at one is perfection.
Fun fact, Lua is has one based indexing for tables.
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.
I love lua patterns soo much!
or you can write your own parser, which, let's face it, is probably gonna be smaller than the regex matcher
Some CS:GO cheats' Lua API's have an ability to run JavaScript code, so we just use that if Lua patterns limit us lol
Has simpler Regex, but still enough to make many things.
I love lua's simple and elegant syntax, like # to get the length, its simple for loop, etc
However it lakes a lot of useful stuff, like math constants PI and Euler etc.
A short spread operator, instead you have to use table.unpack
To print a table you need to unpack it first, print(table.unpack(my_table))
I wish lua or luau had these functions so that i could use it form my data science projects
Fun fact: The PyTorch machine learning library that everyone loves is actually based on the original Torch library, built for Lua.
That's amazing. I literally had no idea and that's my new favourite fact.
@@DaveParr And sadly, Torch library is now abandoned in favor of PyTorch.
😳
how to script: ua-cam.com/video/7fn-qMlC864/v-deo.html
damn
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 :)
same!
same! but for a gamedev ❤
I also started with learning lua when I was around 11 and now i've interned at google twice as a swe
also on Roblox of course
@@isaiahballah2787 nice! hope that all goes well
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
Brainfuck enters the chat.
Thanks man
subleq: 0 or 1
Isn't coffee script a wrapper around js ?
B
The best thing about Lua is that its devs are academics who have been working on it for a very long time now. They think really hard about whether new features are useful, and go to a lot of trouble to implement features in a coherent and efficient way. In other words, their main focus is creating a good language rather than a popular language.
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.
No one cares.
@@gamemoves2415 35.346 People care
@@gamemoves2415 rip bozo
@@gamemoves2415 This is actually a nicely written collection of things that make lua great.
I care and I like this quality comment.
Back to Lua:
Integrating it as a dynamic configuration is also super easy and really flexible. And with LuaJIT the Lua code/configuration can also yield really fast machine code.
@@philippjungkamp3760 so what? Not like anyone is going to use every you've written. If they need lua information they are certainly not coming to an obscure comment. Everyone is going to Google.
While there are no traditional classes in lua, you should note that there is a concept called metatables that allows for object oriented programming.
@@gamemoves2415 someone's mom didn't hug them enough as a kid
Closures are good enough but metatables allow overloading of operators - that's the point but not a strong one.
@@gamemoves2415 "omg guys im so random look mom, im a shitposter!!!!! 😏😏🤩🤩😎😎🤣🤣🤣🤣"
"omg why do i have no friends and social life??? 🤔🤔🤨🙄😥😲🤡😭😭😭😭"
yeah you can even do complex "prototype" chains with them!
@@gamemoves2415 I do, shut up.
Also worth mentioning that Lua is a first-class citizen for Neovim
That array index starting at '1' reaction was hilarious. 🤣 1:32
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.
Lua has become one of my favorite programming languages. It's sheer simplicity makes writing it an absolute joy.
make roblox game
@@xn--719h too hard
yeah, some people hate it for its simplicity and some people love it precisely for it
@@boblol1465 not to mention that Roblox uses their own fork of Lua nowadays called Luau that supports variable types, true multithreading, etc.
I really want to use it but the counting from 1 messes me up :(. Looks like such a cool language otherwise.
First time I heard about lua when I thought about switching vscode by nvim and found out plenty of nvim plugins are written in lua. That was a barrier for me 'cause I really didn't want to spend a lot of time learing new language just to use nvim properly. But just this one small video makes me feel it's not that scary to go into lua. Thank you Jeff for your videos they're really inspiring
how to script: ua-cam.com/video/7fn-qMlC864/v-deo.html
Lua is most probably the easiest language to get into
I know this comment it a year old, but for others: You will literally learn Lua naturally without even trying just by taking the time to configure neovim how you like it. Assuming you have some very minimal programming experience in any language, you can just dive in, you will figure it out as you go without once ever reading the Lua docs.
I agree it's greatly underrated. Its flexibility is amazing. I've hopped around through many languages over the past 15 years, never really feeling comfortable about any. I tried Lua some 4 years ago, and at first I struggled a bit with the 1-indexing, but it didn't take long for me to really settle for it. Coding in Lua is a breeze. I only stopped for about a year because I thought it wasn't fast enough for my gaming projects, but eventually I went back and I found out it was just my bad implementation being bad.
Lua, at least with LOVE/LuaJIT, is actually really fast.
Lua being a simple language is also a plus. When I got back to it after that long pause, I still remembered almost everything about it. And it's also the one language I can go for days or even weeks without needing to check something in its documentation.
Wow bro thanks for information
man lua is so fucking fast. learning to work around the JIT's nuance + storing data in c types will give you ungodly performance you would not believe. People really dont understand how fast this language can get. Those benchmarks showing near C and sometimes faster than C speeds are real.
I agree on lua's flexibility and simplicity, in lua everything just feels really straight forward, i feel like my only limit is the speed of my hands and the language is fast, where as in other languages i feel like i have to do roundabout techniques to get what i want, also lua's first class functions are a huge plus, its painful for me to use a language without first class functions at this point.
Edit: also tables and metatables really deserve more credit, they can do the job of what in other languages you'd have like 4+ things to do it, for example tables can function as: arrays, dictionaries, structs, enums, etc.. and if you learn metatables (easier than they seem) you can emulate classes if you really wanted to, but because of how unbelievably flexible lua ls you wont even feel like you need to, its honestly really sad how it stagnated
I also love lua for how common it is in sandbox games
Be it Roblox (how I discovered it), Gmod, ComputerCraft, you name it. Its quite common in that niche.
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...
And sorry about Python fans, but I learnt more Lua in 1 week that what I learnt about Python in 1 year... I feel Python is becoming complex and clumsy about its syntax and program complexity...
@@xyz2112zyx I realised python is really bad for anything but data science and machine learning
@@hjrgf Yeah, lua imo is best for beginners. its extremely easy to learn.
ain't no way it's this easy, i thought i would need to somehow store 5 hours worth of information in my brain to get it, then this dude shows up with two and a half minutes of info and i can now understand it
Computercraft is a populair Minecraft mod that adds programmable blocks and drones (turtles) into the game, it uses Lua as their scripting language and it's how I got in contact with programming for the first time.
Same here. It was the beginning of my programming career 🙋 I think my very first programm was a password-locked door. Great old times
Computercraft is wild. Played a modpack a year ago and needed something to dig. Didn't have the patience to learn Lua for it, but going through the scripts of others and fixing bugs was really fun
Computercraft is shit. Use OpenComputers.
@@nollix computercraft is just old, for older versions. OpebComputers - remake of ComputerCraft with more flexible API, devices etc.
@@MrFunny01 opencomputers stoppped on 1.12.2, so, no thank you, i'm gonna stick with ComputerCraft as it can even be played at 1.18+ already
It was my first language to deal with, I modded so much things on old Gmod servers in Lua, most of the CS:S and OrangeBox games (based on Source 1 before the BIG source 1 update that killed 120 tick servers...) used Lua to give the community the ability to create plugins ! Loved this one Jeff, thanks for the memories :)
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.
Yes! That's how I really got into programming :)
Fucking loved that mod great memories
I met this mod on my first steps into programming too!
I remember it was possible to use turtles to craft banned stuff like chunk anchors or run thru residences to siphon chests.
Oh man I would love to go back and explore that mod for the first time again (I am sorry to whoever I griefed that one day)
@@Taaz2 Came to talk about my ComputerCraft experience and found somebody who did exactly what I did. I would steal from chests with wireless turtles and it's probably the peak of my minecraft career
@@dauerplay4544 2 words: Open computers (:
This video helped me understand Tables a bit beter, thanks Fireship!
Fun fact: in Scottish Gaelic, “luath” (pronounced much the same as “Lua”) means “fast”.
glé luath! (very fast)
@@Cradien Gu mì-fhortanach, chan eil sìon a dh’fhios agamsa dè cho luath ’s a tha Lua. 🤷🏻♂️😂
Lua is close to being my favourite programming language, especially when it comes to game dev, it is what encouraged me to continue making those types tutorials, since doing it in Lua is quite fun
You are giving me some encouragement to finally sit down and try learning a new language and get back to programming. Question, does LUA only work with C, or it can work with other languages too?
Is there a downside to doing that?
i have learned lua for 5+ years, and all those 5 years were on roblox by this point i have basically mastered lua and wanted to go to other languages like c# and c++, then my lua brain broke when i saw their syntax.
@@AkshayKumarX You can use Lua on its own as well! I'm not really sure if Lua works with other languages, but most languages will have some sort of library that will allow you to execute it in some way ;)
@@AkshayKumarX there are a few Lua bindings for other languages like C#, java, rust and other ones
how to script: ua-cam.com/video/7fn-qMlC864/v-deo.html
Every time I watch one of these 100s videos, I makes me want to diver right into what ever it's about. Most of the time lol. Lua seems very interesting. Great video
Lua does have classes (though it doesn't do them the same way python for example does), they can be created via a metatable and they support inheritance, object values, the self keyword and just about anything else you can think of.
Thanks to the colon operator closely followed by the self keyword, it's obviously an intended feature rather than something that can be simulated.
Actually self is not a keyword but a default defined argument of functions that use the colon notation instead of dot
Lua doesn't have classes, but you can make classes using table.
if lua had classes then there would be a class keyword of something of that sort
@@elpersonpl576 they can have class keyword and still doesn't have classes, if the class keyword is just syntactic sugar.
@@mikumikudice It's pretty much what I meant since I added it right after that point, not to mention that self in Lua cannot be used outside of a function with colon notation, but regardless thank you for the correction.
So glad I came across this language a while ago, becuase of this video! I like the extreme portability and simplicity. Making games and desktop apps (that don't need to be super secure, or don't need to cummunicate with a lot of outside devices (printers, routers etc.)) with this language is pretty painless and straight foreward.
BRASIL! VOCÊ FINALMENTE CRIOU ALGO ÚTIL! OBRIGADO MEU QUERIDO PAÍS!
neovim was created by a brazilian (Thiago de Arruda), so is the second (maybe there are more) useful thing created in Brazil, and curiously, neovim uses Lua for plug-in creation and configuration.
Edit: Elixir is also created by a brazilian, so Lua is definitely not the only useful thing created by them.
@@maushax Vou aprender lua, acho ela ótima pra scripting
@@maushax Brazil invented planes....
Cara acredite ou n'ao, com o pouco investimento que a gente tem, a gente realmente é pioneiro em muita coisa na TI.
Por isso que ficou mais claro de noite
Some time ago I wanted to contribute to an open source program. For this I had to learn LUA. I really started to love it for it being so simple yet so powerful.
You can define dictionary tables without the `["index"]` syntax. That is only required for using non-standard names (like ones containing special characters) or when the key you want to assign something to is dynamic (for example, you want to assign specific keys from a loop, but you don't know the key name at that point). This syntax works as well (and from what I understand, seems to be the convention): `local t = { x = 4, y = 2 }`. You can also access table fields both using `varname["key"]` and a more "object"-asque syntax with `varname.key`.
Exactly. Roblox even _encourages_ using object-style syntax with tables (if the key is a valid variable name, just alphanumerics and no spaces, you're golden for nesting keys as far as you want, and in fact that's literally how accessing game objects in the DataModel natively works, they're functionally just tables inside tables). I got quite good at scripting back when I was still interested in the game, and even made a few ModuleScripts (libraries) for referencing Terrain voxels (which natively have to be accessed using stud coordinates for some reason???) using more reasonable "one voxel, one index over" coordinates, aka how Minecraft and literally all other voxel engines read and write their data structures...
Just like Javascript
JavaScript flashbacks
Ugh, now I'm getting docked hipster points for my preferred language being covered on this channel! ;)
Understandable omitting the use of metamethods & metatables given the 100 second overview, but they are a very powerful concept that allow you to (amongst other things) write in an object-oriented manner also. Definitely worthwhile exploring for any folks interested in picking up Lua
Eu programo em Lua já alguns anos e sempre enjeto código C no meio. Fica super legal para os propósitos que eu preciso, aínda mais para sistemas de embarcação!
what do you use lua for? embedded system?
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.
My god i never knew there was a language easier to learn than python, Lua truly is an underrated language
It's....beautiful, even more than python. And not just that, but even faster, if this vid is correct.
@Linux user i can confirm its usually 3.2x times faster than python (lua 5.2.1 vs python 3.9.8)
@@skyhappy ugliest part about the language is the starting index of 1
@@internetsfinest8839 and the lack of typing... I can see one easy falling into the same javascript nonsense.
@@internetsfinest8839 I disagree, humans start counting at 1, not 0
Lua was my first real language, but for doing certain things I learned some other languages, because I assumed that since those languages are more popular, they must be better; now you have blown my mind.
Lua is simple and easy to learn. Perfect scripting language to implement if anyone is interested
Its also a unsafe and exploitable scripting langauge since exploits can use a dll to hack into the c++ code
@@nikolaievans2432 any language can be exploited. it's not unsafe if you do good practices
This is the greatest video ever, now I know a lot more about Lua than I already did :0
0:53
"To install it, install it"
*Very* *useful* *information*
he said "to get started, install it" smh
"famous for being underrated" this is some infinite iq humour
would love to see some scala stuff too! great content as always
I've heard of Lua once when I was in college, didn't think too much of it.
Watching this video has piqued my interest again -- insanely awesome!
I think it's incredibly powerful, that Lua has a C API that allows developers to run Lua code in a C program, and vice versa.
Great -- how am I suppose to get my work for the day done now? 😂
This happpens to me every single time I discover something new 🤣
I also thought Lua was just a meme. But a lightweight interpreted language sounds very interesting...
But be aware that although the "run Lua code in a C Program" part is very easy to do, the "run C program in lua code" will require a lot of binding work.
about running C inside an interpreted language is nothing new really, most language has support to it, Ruby for example has a lot of libs(gems) that uses C to speed up the code
@@victor95pc It's called FFI (foreign function interface). This technology is present in all jit (just in time) compilers of various languages (see JNA for Java or cffi in python/pypy). It binds at runtime instead of compile-time so calling bound functions is a bit slower.
My favorite thing about lua is that garrys mod and roblox both use it, and are extremly customizable games
Using lua for modding games is ducking amazing
I had no idea that such a relevant programming language was created in my country.
somos brabos :)
Nem eu.
Brs mandando a ver.
Elixir tambem é br
@@GuilherHast Mano, não posso ver nenhum canal gringo que tem mais outros brs por lá kkkkkkkkk
Sometimes I just wish there was more than 1 channel like fireship, or more jeffs/people running fireship to produce more high quality videos and tutorials on every technology
This vid came at the perfect time for me. Since I'm just starting to work my way up to building a working config in neovim - and need to learn just enough lua to get by. I knew next to nothing about lua except for the array indexing weirdness, and now I have a much better grasp of the 'Lua Philosophy' now.
Thanks Mr. Ship!
I suppose it's worth noting that you can in practice use tables with zero indexing, with the caveat that you compensate for it in *for* loops (e.g. subtract 1 from the limit, as in *for i=0, width-1 do)* and keep in mind you shouldn't rely on *#* to get the length of that table, because *#* doesn't take the index 0 into account (or else keep in mind the length of the table will be *#table** + 1).* This is usually not a problem, though. When I started out in Lua I found it a bit confusing to know when I should use 1 and when I could safely use 0, but it didn't take much time to get it figured out.
Back when I was still first learning programming I got super burnt out on C/C++ over the years. Lua was the language that reignited my love for programming and games development. It can be such a joy to use!
Same history: I started to learn programming with C++ and it was hard. I mean, got many of the concepts of programming, but it wasn't funny. Then, I wanted to learn how to make games in Roblox and win money and I got to learn Lua. Now I don't make Roblox games, but I use Lua for pretty much any programming task I want.
0:05 21 keywords (reserve words) vs 33
0:16 Virtual machine matches closely to the C language
0:38 1 Data Structuring Mechanism called a { Table }
0:45 Multi tasking with coroutine
1:00 Dynamic typing
LUA was really fun to learn when I was making WoW mods. It became a meme at my company where I would suggest we rewrite the front end of our entire application library in LUA at almost every standup meeting ha
Lua has to be one of my favorite programming languages.
Why so
@@skyhappy It was one of the first languages i could properly code in. also it was pretty easy to learn.
Can you tell me what interesting things you do with Lua?
@@周杨-r1c i made a really bad discord bot this one time
@@周杨-r1cyou can make anything you can imagine
I use Awesome window manager as daily driver in my debian machine, which is fully written in Lua. So I had to learn a little bit of it in order to customize my desktop to my linking. I found it super easy to get my head around quickly and had a lot of fun configuring (after coming from Qtile which is written in Python).
I use AwesomeWM too!
@ 1:37 "It starts an index from 1 instead of 0"
Matlab : Finally, a worthy opponent, our battle will be legendary!
Coding in Lua makes me happy for no reason, just gives me a simplicity vibe, feel good aura.
Perfect timing. I'm writing a Lua related article on O3DE(formerly Lumberyard). Thank you Jeff.
I really like functional programming. At the moment I am really loving Elixir. I hope you can cover it in the near future. Thank you for all your GREAT content!!!
@@ChristophBackhaus I think that functional programming goes well with object-oriented programmming. Scala is an example of that.
Such style is possible even in Java with streams, records and some elements of pattern matching, but it's annoying there because streams are single-use and there needs to be a lot of boilerplate.
Coincidentally it's a Brazilian language too!
how to script: ua-cam.com/video/7fn-qMlC864/v-deo.html
Fitting that, on St Valentine's day, you post a video about my first and only programming language crush
Sounds like a perfect reason to check out the LÖVE videogame engine/framework! It makes use of Lua for all of its scripting
@@_mickmccarthy That's actually how I got started with Lua, yeah
it is so underated, people think its so hard to code with lua but it is super easy to do
Yeah lua is very easy, it's what got me into programming.
@@NotePortal same
I was thinking during the video and lua was my first contact with lua progamming bots for Tibia, amazing and very easy language 🇧🇷
Funnily enough I learned Lua when I was an admin on a Wikia (now Fandom) site. Did some cool stuff with it, like parsing a bespoke record format I created to draw tables, which is nigh impossible with wiki markup. Things went sideways and I left but the things I learned on the Mediawiki environment I'd always cherish.
Lua being the scripting language of choice of many programs like VLC and Garry's Mod makes it easy for me to dip my toes into them too, as I approach them as a returning Lua coder instead.
holy shit I'm pretty sure I recognize you -- aren't you the guy who made Notiplus?
how to script: ua-cam.com/video/7fn-qMlC864/v-deo.html
So we'll all just gonna ignore that this guy convinced 1M+ people that 100 seconds = 2:30 minutes?
Yes
Wow I learnt Lua literally in 100s.
learnt in 50s on 2x 😎
@@1hsl Converted the video into 2x speed and watched in 2x speed
And learnt in 25sec 😎😎
Lol! 😂
@@lakshman587 convert the 2x2x to 2x2x2x to learn it in 12.5 secs
Skip to the end, learn *instantly* 😎
@@SolathPrime converted the 2x2x2x into 2x2x2x100x and learned it in 0.125 seconds
My first encounter with Lua was on roblox, I was probably only 9 or 10 at the time but even at that age I was able to grasp the absolute basics, that's how simple Lua is. A few years after that I attempted to get into minecraft modding, but the absurd amount of work required to just do anything in Java immediately made me gave up because it was so much more fun to use Lua and especially roblox's engine which basically makes the barrier of entry to being a gamedev absolutely non-existent.
ive been a scripter in lua for around 2 years and im suprised that i was still able to learn new things from a very short video on something i am already very experienced at
Lua is a really cool programming language, some would even say that beginners should start with Lua and not Python for an introduction to programming.
I started with lua, making games on ROBLOX. I now do lua and python, (lua due to Roblox and python due to GCSE computer science), and I have to say I do enjoy lua more. It's syntax is very easy to pick up
Lua is a bad first language if you are not doing it for fun or planning on doing video game development. It teaches you bad habits and is very different from the majority of "real world" applications.
@@ZephrymWOW Bad habits?
@@real_qnex Using globals by default for starters
@@nwa8169 I started with lua in college
Lua é a linguagem mais fácil de aprender :)
Nunca pensei que ia ter um video sobre a linguagem lua aqui
@Fireship, do Django in 100 seconds!
Lua is completely underrated. I played around with it to show my kids how to build their own Roblox games, and it was a joy to work with.
the first programming language i learned happy to see people know it exists
It would be appreciable if you can make full length Lua programming series or suggest some best tutorials for this language.😊
1:37 ... i'm head out.
Man! I've never known that a language existed with these many features and syntax easier than python.
It's still hard
I'm currently learning lua right now due to a current order I have. I hope I am able to finish the order in time! Lezzgo. Thanks for this brief description Jeff. As far as I know, Lua's performance is faster than python but python has more standard library. Both are dynamically typed though.
damn, i didn't know it was this simple. I think my imagination was overcomplicating it because of all the objects and things in Roblox studio, but the language itself is pretty easy, thanks for giving me a new POV.
This language looks cool actually. Lua can be found in most industrial embedded devices like sensors, PLC, and HMI development toolkit. I still don’t get why it is so underrated.
Its underrated because Google chose Python, and a lot of really important libraries followed suit.
I believe in Lua supremacy.
@@Pyrohawk I mean its just true. The only thing Lua is really missing is more popular libraries. If it had that it'd be a solid competitor to Python.
@@iamunamed5800 LUA is intended to be a simplest-but-functional scripting language to be added to your C program. It is not self-sufficient by design. LUA must drop this simplicity principle to be able to become self-sufficient and be able to compete with python. It will effectively prevent LUA being LUA.
As a Brazilian it's cool to know that there is a Brazilian programming language (that is actually good)
There's Elixir as well (and it's becoming very popular)
Indeed
Indeed
@@SrIgort indeed
@@nollix You're trying too hard to be a jerk, this is cringe
As a brazilian developer I'm astonished to not being aware of this, as always great content!
Elixir was also created in Brazil !
me too, that's mind-boggling
I used lua for my game's scripting language (the engine is written in C++) and it made letting other less coder devs get involved in the coding and make useful functions without having to understand the nasty engine stuff. It has been great. I really love how simple it is while retaining a c-like syntax. My only complaint is that it indexes at 1, only thing I'd really want to change about it is make it index at 0, like every other normal language. Everything else is pretty intuitive and sensible. Would highly recommend using it as a scripting language for a game, but don't have much experience using it for other things.
I've never seen one of these code in x amount of time videos actually be entertaining and informative
lua was one of the first languages that i tippied my toes on when i was 12, i got inspired by roblox games and i wanted to make one myself, and it didn't work out
Roblox lua was one of my first languages as well lol
I'd love to see a video about fp-ts library for functional programming in typescript. It (un)suprisingly gains a lot of traction right now, at least in terms of npm downloads per week.
I'd also add that lua has proper tail call recursion, so you can use functional paradigms without bloating your stack (yes I'm looking at you python) - and this was before funcional programming was hip.
"To get started, install it" me having a mental breakdown installing it.
I was looking for a language to start learning coding and this looks perfect!
'dynamic language' and 'no type annotations are required' are two different things. You can write a C++ program always using auto etc. but it still isn't dynamically typed.
but auto still is type annotation, no?
Fun fact, you can put functions within tables to mimic classes, you can even use a special metatable keyword in a for loop to create new copies of the class.
All my years of programming games in Defold are paying off 😂
It is also used in Adobe to create plugins for products like Lightroom and Photoshop.
I've only ever used Lua for ROBLOX and Garry's Mod scripting, but it seems interesting. Great video!
"There are no classes in Lua"
Now you got my attention.
You can also create an index on a table just giving the key name and value:
*local foo = { bar = 1 };*
*print(foo.bar);*
PS: *local* is practically mandatory in terms of best practices.
His showing true right way to create dicts! `local foo = { for = 1 }` - unexpected symbol error `local foo {["for"] = 1}` - works always fine! Never do bad code!
@@TuXAPuK bad code would be to use reserved words as a key, but anyway, yes, you can also use indexing to create keys
First introduction to Lua for me was World of Warcraft modding, but nowadays I use it only for programming stuff in modded Minecraft (CCTweaked, OpenComputers). Oh how I despise meta tables though. I've been doing OOP for so long that my brain is wired to think in classes. It's a neat language though, as long as you're open to think a bit differently.
Those fancy fluid logos - who makes them? And how? Any chance you could make a short tutorial about those? Really, really beautiful!
In Davinci Resolve (Or Fusion) you can just make a Fusion template with nodes and change the source image. Then you can reuse this template.
I love that I started using Roblox's Luau to get started on programming. Now I create stuff in Java too.
im glad word is getting out about lua being underrated. people think its just a bad kids programming language because its used to make roblox games, but its so much more
lua was one of the first languages I learned and it’s awesome!
Why so
Wow, i didn't know lua was created by brazilians (even though i'm brazilian)
Cool, very very cool
I spent much of my childhood playing with lua in first Roblox, then Garry's mod and World of Warcraft. It might even be the main reason I study cs today.
Lua is great. I love the simplicity!
as someone who has been learning game dev on roblox for a while n is taking a cs class where python is being taught i can guarantee that lua is so much easier to learn
0:11 É... Finalmente nós Brasileiros...
yessir
@@Tealen 👍?
@@megasst4747 ✅️