Oddly enough, Lua was my first introduction to programming. I was into Valve's Half Life games and Garry's Mod, and Lua was typically the way that you'd make modifications to things (e.g. increase player movement speed). That would interact with the Source engine, which was in C++, but you could do a lot of stuff without ever touching C++ [1].

I didn't even really think of it as programming at the time. You start by just changing constants, like what if we make gravity = 2 instead of 9.8 m/s2? And then build up from there. I think is what a lot of these educational programming games try to replicate today.

After a while, I got confident enough to the point of trying to do things in LÖVE, which is a free and open-source 2D game engine that uses Lua [2]. What I learned there is the reason why I eventually studied computer science in college. That said, when I return to Lua, it feels a bit limited, but I suppose that's the point! I never really questioned it at the time.

"Lua is not object-oriented. That is it." Laughed out loud when I read this. It was funny to learn programming without the concept of classes, and then realize that Lua is the exception, not the rule.

[1] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Embedding_Lua_in_th... [2] https://love2d.org/