Comment by krapp
1 year ago
"most people should use the things I use and am familiar with" is a common opinion but you should realize that between Javascript and Lua, Lua is the boring standard language in this context.
Also there are whole books written on the quirks you need to master with Javascript. Lua has its rough edges but it's a much simpler language, so there are far fewer of them.
Lua has a ton of sharp edges, they just don't manifest themselves as much as with JavaScript since JS has a different "typical use case" and aren't as often discussed. Writing user facing UIs, with all that it entails, is a great way to uncover and experience all possible sharp edges.
And a lot of the issues with JavaScript just wouldn't matter for an "embedded scripting engine" use case imo.
What’s the end-user segment where Lua is more widely known than JavaScript?
Game dev, possibly (even that seems highly debatable). But the article was making the case that Lua should be more widely used outside of that niche.
Doesn't matter if it's widely known, it honestly is much nicer to work with than Javascript and is being used as it is intended, instead of being a half-baked language designed in a hurry, to work in a browser, that got repurposed as a general purpose scripting language later.