I love pico 8, but I think that Lua is probably the worst language for coding in an editor that can fit so few characters on the screen, and it feels like using an external editor defeats the point. Granted, I haven't used the software in a couple of years, has it improved on the editor front?
I'm surprised you feel that way. Lua seems like a perfect choice for pico-8. Its syntax is friendly and concise, and it's maybe simplest language to embed, with tiny footprint. Almost all other languages I know of would be a worse choice. Scratch would be nice, but graphical editor is harder to integrate. What's more suitable language in your opinion?
Well it's only because of the issue with the built-in editor, since lua isn't really that concise in terms of character count imo. Also the official tutorial is a published book which I find a little distasteful although understandable. You are right though I can't really think of a better language to use
You can attach an external editor if you want, though I think it is not needed for learning. There is more value in the tight integration than the conveniences of a great text editor.
I've used this Sublime Text Package which works well:
The great thing about Lua is the language itself is so small, and not just from an implementation perspective. The spec and documentation are also small because there's not much to learn.
You can explain it in an afternoon. Try that with C++ or JavaScript.
It's also fast and it can be made to run in deterministic time. Plus the C API is something I can actually read and understand, which is true of none of the other scripting languages I've used(Python, Perl, et. al.).
