newlispfanclub.alh.net

Dear friends,

I want to know which one is easier to learn and more usable : "LUA" or " newlisp" for casual scripting purposes and especially for a beginner.


thanks,

By the question itself i would like to advice you to do no programming at all.

Try both and see. Otherwise it all depends on what you want to accomplish. If you want to script Celestia, for example, use Lua. If you want to rename files, use newLISP.

Of course there is more to newLISP than renaming files ;). It is suitable for general scripting, as you would do with Python, Perl, Ruby or Lua.

newLISP's strengths are at writing applications involving a lot of networking, distributed and parallel processing. It is good too for embedded systems, because of it's small footprint and small usage of other resources. A variety of functions have built-in regular expression support and Bayesian and other statistical functions are built in, which make newLISP specially useful for natural language processing tasks.

newLISP's strict implementation of the "data equals program" paradigm, make it well suited for modeling any kind of thoughts and ideas in either data or program or both. This is why you find many users from creative professions among newLISP users.

I have updated the http://newlisp.org home page to reflect some of the above statements. If anybody has an idea to improve the English writing on this, please let me know.

Lua is "just a language", with far less features and capabilities right out of the box. It's a nice one, but you quickly need to install extensions and libraries. There are lot of them availlable, but that make lua less portable, and harder to manage. On the other side, newlisp is feature rich, and easier for distributing your scripts, as in most case a simple fresh install provide all you need to run your scripts.

Next you have to chose from "algol style" syntax (lua) or lisp syntax... it's (mainly but not only) a matter of taste.

Finaly, if you intend to script some existing application, the scripting language is no more a choice : renoise use lua, blender use python... and so on...

thanks a lot "Ormente" , your reply is so useful.