Realized I haven’t learned any new programming languages in a while, so I picked up a copy of Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks.
Each chapter covers a different language. They’re broken up into ‘Days’, with each day’s exercises digging deeper into the language.
Here’s what I learned about the first language in the book, Lua:
Day One
Just a dip into basic syntax.- table based
- embeddable
- whitespace doesn't matter
- no integers, only floating-point (!)
- comparison operators will not coerce their arguments, so you can't do =42 < '43'
- functions are first class
- has tail-call-optimization (!)
- extra args are ignored
- omitted args just get nil
- variables are global by default (!)
- can use anything as key in table, including functions
- array indexes start at 1 (!)
Day Two
Multithreading and OOP.- no multithreading, no threads at all
- coroutines will only ever run on one core, so have to handle blocking and unblocking them manually
- explicit over implicit, i guess?
- since can use functions as values in tables, can build entire OO system from scratch using (self) passed in as first value to those functions
- coroutines can also get you memoization, since yielding means the state of the fn is saved and resumed later
- modules: can choose what gets exported, via another table at the bottom
Day Three
A very cool project -- build a midi player in Lua with C++ interop -- that was incredibly frustrating to get working. Nothing in the chapter was helpful. Learned more about C++ and Mac OS X audio than Lua.- had to add Homebrew's Lua include directory (/usr/local/Cellar/lua/5.2.4_3/include) into include_directories command in CMakeLists.txt file
- when compiling play.cpp, linker couldn't find lua libs, so had to invoke the command by hand (after reading ld manual) with brew lua lib directory added to its search path via -L
- basically, add this to CMakeFiles/play.dir/link.txt: -L /usr/local/Cellar/lua/5.2.4_3/lib -L /usr/local/Cellar/rtmidi/2.1.1/lib
- adding those -L declarations will ensure make will find the right lib directories when doing its ld invocation (linking)
- also had to go into the Audio Midi Setup utility and set the IAC Driver to device is online in order for any open ports to show up
- AND then needed to be sure was running the Simplesynth application with the input set to the IAC Driver, to be able to hear the notes
