We used Luerl, the underlying Lua engine, in production for years as a sandboxed scripting environment for FarmBot devices back in the day. Users could execute scripts directly on the device to control peripherals. It was a solid library and the community support was great. From an ergonomics perspective, developers preferred this approach over API calls. I am surprised more projects don’t provide a Lua scripting layer.
> I am surprised more projects don’t provide a Lua scripting layer.
Completely agree. I've been adding Lua scripting support to pretty much everything I make now. Most recently my programmable SSE server [1]. It's extended the functionality far beyond anything that I would have had the time and patience to do myself. Lua is such a treat.
The job market is a diverse place, but since you are posting this on HN I assume you are most interested in tech hiring. My anecdotal perusing of layoffs.fyi seems to indicate “no”. It seems like last month was an unusually high month for layoffs and I’ve been surprised by the lack of commentary on this.
Steve Vickers was my university lecturer circa 1995. His course was legendarily difficult, in contrast to his lucid tutorials in both the Jupiter Ace and ZX81 manuals! The list of his papers on Wikipedia should give you a flavour of what the course was about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Vickers_(computer_scient...
Steve from LingQ once mentioned in passing on a Vlog that they have done studies where they gave students vocabulary lists (plus a vocabulary list free control group) before giving them a reading passage to study in a foreign language and they found that the vocabulary list group had worse outcomes. Does anyone happen to know which study this is? It has always stuck with me but I’ve never actually been able to pin down the exact study he was talking about.
"A Comparative Study on the Effectiveness of Using Traditional and Contextualized Methods for Enhancing Learners’ Vocabulary Knowledge in an EFL Classroom" where those who were given traditional vocabulary lists performed worse.
Good find. The description of the actual experimental conditions is incredibly vague, but it sounds to me a bit like the control group only got the vocabulary list with definitions and didn't read the short story, whereas the experimental group only read the short story and didn't get any definitions. Then the experimental group was able to successfully complete ≈10 of 15 fill-in-the-blank questions vs the control groups ≈8.
That is an okay experiment to compare the two teaching methods, but doesn't address the question of what happens when you combine them by reading a text with an accompanying vocabulary list. I would be rather surprised if additional access to definitions actually hurt learning. Like, what are dictionaries for, then?
Really glad to see more apps that focus on sentence level speaking and listening. I wish the mobile landing page had more screenshots of the app since my target language is not yet supported.
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