Comment by samatman
3 years ago
Lua needs mentioning here, on a 1-5 scale where more is better, I rank it (a): 4, (b): 2, 3 if you're using LuaJIT, (c): 5, and (d): 5.
That last one is the surprising one: we're about to see a generation of programmers who learned Lua via Roblox when they were 8-13 years old. Roblox is singlehandedly in the process of making Lua the #1 beginners language, and if not the most popular language by number of developers, then at least the most undercounted.
I use Lua all of the time, since it's such an easy language to embed in other projects.
I use it in embedded systems (think 128MiB of memory -- not tiny, but not enormous either) and it's fantastic. I can make changes to logic on the device without cross compiling things and I can make changes quickly to test things out.
I'm in my 40s, and definitely not part of the Roblox generation. I just really like the simplicity of the language and how it's small enough to pick up in an afternoon. More complicated topics like coroutines and upvalues might take a little longer to fully grasp, along with ffi in LuaJIT if you're going that route.
Tcl is my go-to embedded language. I tried Lua a while back but butted heads up against it's "just use a table as a list" idea (that didn't work quite right; but that was a long time ago) and became frustrated with it.
libtcl8.6.so is 1.8MiB on my desktop, and liblua5.1.so.5.1.5 is 186KiB.
Maybe there are ways to shrink libtcl or cut pieces out, but that's quite a difference.
I've found that for most of my tasks the order of things is not terribly important. I suppose that if I really needed this I could add my own ordered list data type to Lua.