Team 973 Code Now Public

[Ginto8]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Ross can provide more detailed answers on the technical side, but I'll field some of the reasons.

...

I can help with some technical reasons as well:

As BigJ pointed out, Lua is used in a lot of games. The interesting thing about use in games is that games have very strict speed requirements. If a game is designed to run at 30 frames per second, everything has to run within 1/30 of a second (about 33 ms) or your game is going to lag. Games tend toward Lua because it's very light and very fast (some benchmark comparisons to python are available here), while still having the high-level advantages of a scripting language.

Even disregarding the speed or the general advantages of high-level interpreted languages vs lower-level compiled languages, Lua as a language is impressively flexible, with first-class functions and extensible tables allowing programmers capable of a little more abstract thinking to make some extremely clever code. It wouldn't necessarily be my first choice for FIRST programming, but I can definitely see why team 973 settled on it.