Comment by antirez

20 hours ago

If this had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua. Lua was chosen based on the implementation requirements, not on the language ones... (small, fast, ANSI-C). I appreciate certain ideas in Lua, and people love it, but I was never able to like Lua, because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax and semantics without good reasons, for my taste. This creates friction for newcomers. I love friction when it opens new useful ideas and abstractions that are worth it, if you learn SmallTalk or FORTH and for some time you are lost, it's part of how the languages are different. But I think for Lua this is not true enough: it feels like it departs from what people know without good reasons.

152 comments

antirez

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norir  19 hours ago

I don't love a good deal of Lua's syntax, but I do think the authors had good reasons for their choices and have generally explained them. Even if you disagree, I think "without good reasons" is overly dismissive.

Personally though, I think the distinctive choices are a boon. You are never confused about what language you are writing because Lua code is so obviously Lua. There is value in this. Once you have written enough Lua, your mind easily switches in and out of Lua mode. Javascript, on the other hand, is filled with poor semantic decisions which for me, cancel out any benefits from syntactic familiarity.

More importantly, Lua has a crucial feature that Javascript lacks: tail call optimization. There are programs that I can easily write in Lua, in spite of its syntactic verbosity, that I cannot write in Javascript because of this limitation. Perhaps this particular JS implementation has tco, but I doubt it reading the release notes.

I have learned as much from Lua as I have Forth (SmallTalk doesn't interest me) and my programming skill has increased significantly since I switched to it as my primary language. Lua is the only lightweight language that I am aware of with TCO. In my programs, I have banned the use of loops. This is a liberation that is not possible in JS or even c, where TCO cannot be relied upon.

In particular, Lua is an exceptional language for writing compilers. Compilers are inherently recursive and thus languages lacking TCO are a poor fit (even if people have been valiantly forcing that square peg through a round hole for all this time).

Having said all that, perhaps as a scripting language for Redis, JS is a better fit. For me though Lua is clearly better than JS on many different dimensions and I don't appreciate the needless denigration of Lua, especially from someone as influential as you.

  • kbenson  15 hours ago

    > For me though Lua is clearly better than JS on many different dimensions and I don't appreciate the needless denigration of Lua, especially from someone as influential as you.

    Is it needless? It's useful specifically because he is someone influential, and someone might say "Lua was antirez's choice when making redis, and I trust and respect his engineering, so I'm going to keep Lua as a top contender for use in my project because of that" and him being clear on his choices and reasoning is useful in that respect. In any case where you think he has a responsibility to be careful what he says because of that influence, that can also be used in this case as a reason he should definitely explain his thoughts on it then and now.

  • ksec  9 hours ago

    > I think the distinctive choices are a boon. You are never confused about what language you are writing because Lua code is so obviously Lua. There is value in this.

    This. And not just Lua , but having different kind of syntax for scripting languages or very high level languages signal it is something entirely different, and not C as in system programming language.

    The syntax is also easier for people who dont intend to make programming as their profession, but simply want something done. It used to be the case in the old days people would design simple PL for new beginners, ActionScript / Flash era and even Hypercard before that. Unfortunately the industry is no longer interested in it, and if anything intend to make every as complicated as possible.

  • bakkoting  17 hours ago

    Formally JavaScript is specified as having TCO as of ES6, although for unfortunate and painful reasons this is spec fiction - Safari implements it, but Firefox and Chrome do not. Neither did QuickJS last I checked and I don't think this does either.

  • teo_zero  17 hours ago

    > Lua has a crucial feature that Javascript lacks: tail call optimization.

    I'm not familiar with Lua, but I expect tco to be a feature of the compiler, not of the language. Am I wrong?

    • mananaysiempre  15 hours ago

      You’re wrong in the way in which many people are wrong when they hear about a thing called “tail-call optimization”, which is why some people have been trying to get away from the term in favour of “proper tail calls” or something similar, at least as far as R5RS[1]:

      > A Scheme implementation is properly tail-recursive if it supports an unbounded number of active tail calls.

      The issue here is that, in every language that has a detailed enough specification, there is some provision saying that a program that makes an unbounded number of nested calls at runtime is not legal. Support for proper tail calls means that tail calls (a well-defined subgrammar of the language) do not ever count as nested, which expands the set of legal programs. That’s a language feature, not (merely) a compiler feature.

      [1] https://standards.scheme.org/corrected-r5rs/r5rs-Z-H-6.html#...

      8 replies →

    • kerkeslager  15 hours ago

      I don't think you're wrong per se. This is a "correct" way of thinking of the situation, but it's not the only correct way and it's arguably not the most useful.

      A more useful way to understand the situation is that a language's major implementations are more important than the language itself. If the spec of the language says something, but nobody implements it, you can't write code against the spec. And on the flip side, if the major implementations of a language implement a feature that's not in the spec, you can write code that uses that feature.

      A minor historical example of this was Python dictionaries. Maybe a decade ago, the Python spec didn't specify that dictionary keys would be retrieved in insertion order, so in theory, implementations of the Python language could do something like:

        >>> abc = {}
  >>> abc['a'] = 1
  >>> abc['b'] = 2
  >>> abc['c'] = 3
  >>> abc.keys()
  dict_keys(['c', 'a', 'b'])

      But the CPython implementation did return all the keys in insertion order, and very few people were using anything other than the CPython implementation, so some codebases started depending on the keys being returned in insertion order without even knowing that they were depending on it. You could say that they weren't writing Python, but that seems a bit pedantic to me.

      In any case, Python later standardized that as a feature, so now the ambiguity is solved.

      It's all very tricky though, because for example, I wrote some code a decade that used GCC's compare-and-swap extensions, and at least at that time, it didn't compile on Clang. I think you'd have a stronger argument there that I wasn't writing C--not because what I wrote wasn't standard C, but because the code I wrote didn't compile on the most commonly used C compiler. The better approach to communication in this case, I think, is to simply use phrases that communicate what you're doing: instead of saying "C", say "ANSI C", "GCC C", "Portable C", etc.--phrases that communicate what implementations of the language you're supporting. Saying you're writing "C" isn't wrong, it's just not communicating a very important detail: what implementations of the compiler can compile your code. I'm much more interested in effectively communicating what compilers can compile a piece of code than pedantically gatekeeping what's C and what's not.

      4 replies →

  • xonix  19 hours ago

    Re: TCO

    Does the language give any guarantee that TCO was applied? In other words can it give you an error that the recursion is not of tail call form? Because I imagine a probability of writing a recursion and relying on it being TCO-optimized, where it's not. I would prefer if a language had some form of explicit TCO modifier for a function. Is there any language that has this?

  • lioeters  19 hours ago

    > as my primary language

    I'd love to hear more how it is, the state of the library ecosystem, language evolution (wasn't there a new major version recently?), pros/cons, reasons to use it compared to other languages.

    About tail-calls, in other languages I've found sometimes a conversion of recursive algorithm to a flat iterative loop with stack/queue to be effective. But it can be a pain, less elegant or intuitive than TCO.

    • alexdowad  18 hours ago

      Lua isn't my primary programming language now, but it was for a while. My personal experience on the library ecosystem was:

      It's definitely smaller than many languages, and this is something to consider before selecting Lua for a project. But, on the positive side: With some 'other' languages I might find 5 or 10 libraries all doing more or less the same thing, many of them bloated and over-engineered. But with Lua I would often find just one library available, and it would be small and clean enough that I could easily read through its source code and know exactly how it worked.

      Another nice thing about Lua when run on LuaJIT: extremely high CPU performance for a scripting language.

      In summary: A better choice than it might appear at first, but with trade-offs which need serious consideration.

  • vanviegen  8 hours ago

    I do not think your compiler argument in support of TCO is very convincing.

    Do you really need to write compilers with limitless nesting? Or is nesting, say, 100.000 deep enough, perhaps?

    Also, you'll usually want to allocate some data structure to create an AST for each level. So that means you'll have some finite limit anyway. And that limit is a lot easier to hit in the real world, as it applies not just to nesting depth, but to the entire size of your compilation unit.

    • lpribis  7 hours ago

      TCO is not just for parse trees or AST, but in imperative languages without TCO this is the only place you are "forced" to use recursion. You can transform any loop in you program to recursion if you prefer, which is what the author does.

  • kerkeslager  15 hours ago

    > More importantly, Lua has a crucial feature that Javascript lacks: tail call optimization. There are programs that I can easily write in Lua, in spite of its syntactic verbosity, that I cannot write in Javascript because of this limitation. Perhaps this particular JS implementation has tco, but I doubt it reading the release notes.

    > [...] In my programs, I have banned the use of loops. This is a liberation that is not possible in JS or even c, where TCO cannot be relied upon.

    This is not a great language feature, IMO. There are two ways to go here:

    1. You can go the Python way, and have no TCO, not ever. Guido van Rossum's reasoning on this is outlined here[1] and here[2], but the high level summary is that TCO makes it impossible to provide acceptably-clear tracebacks.

    2. You can go the Chicken Scheme way, and do TCO, and ALSO do CPS conversion, which makes EVERY call into a tail call, without language user having to restructure their code to make sure their recursion happens at the tail.

    Either of these approaches has its upsides and downsides, but TCO WITHOUT CPS conversion gives you the worst of both worlds. The only upside is that you can write most of your loops as recursion, but as van Rossum points out, most cases that can be handled with tail recursion, can AND SHOULD be handled with higher-order functions. This is just a much cleaner way to do it in most cases.

    And the downsides to TCO without CPS conversion are:

    1. Poor tracebacks.

    2. Having to restructure your code awkwardly to make recursive calls into tail calls.

    3. Easy to make a tail call into not a tail call, resulting in stack overflows.

    I'll also add that the main reason recursion is preferable to looping is that it enables all sorts of formal verification. There's some tooling around formal verification for Scheme, but the benefits to eliminating loops are felt most in static, strongly typed languages like Haskell or OCaml. As far as I know Lua has no mature tooling whatsoever that benefits from preferring recursion over looping. It may be that the author of the post I am responding to finds recursion more intuitive than looping, but my experience contains no evidence that recursion is inherently more intuitive than looping: which is more intuitive appears to me to be entirely a function of the programmer's past experience.

    In short, treating TCO without CPS conversion as a killer feature seems to me to be a fetishization of functional programming without understanding why functional programming is effective, embracing the madness with none of the method.

    EDIT: To point out a weakness to my own argument: there are a bunch of functional programming language implementations that implement TCO without CPS conversion. I'd counter by saying that this is a function of when they were implemented/standardized. Requiring CPS conversion in the Scheme standard would pretty clearly make Scheme an easier to use language, but it would be unreasonable in 2025 to require CPS conversion because so many Scheme implementations don't have it and don't have the resources to implement it.

    EDIT 2: I didn't mean for this post to come across as negative on Lua: I love Lua, and in my hobby language interpreter I've been writing, I have spent countless hours implementing ideas I got from Lua. Lua has many strengths--TCO just isn't one of them. When I'm writing Scheme and can't use a higher-order function, I use TCO. When I'm writing Lua and can't use a higher order function, I use loops. And in both languages I'd prefer to use a higher order function.

    [1] https://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/tail-recursion-elim...

    [2] https://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/final-words-on-tail...

    • kerkeslager  9 hours ago

      EDIT 3: Looking at Lua's overall implementation, it seems to be focused on being fast and lightweight.

      I don't know why Lua implemented TCO, but if I had to guess, it's not because it enables you to replace loops with recursion, it's because it... optimizes tail calls. It causes tail calls to use less memory, and this is particularly effective in Lua's implementation because it reuses the stack memory that was just used by the parent call, meaning it uses memory which is already in the processor's cache.

      The thing is, a loop is still going to be slightly faster than TCOed recursion, because you don't need to move the arguments to the tail call function into the previous stack frame. In a loop your counters and whatnot are just always using the same memory location, no copying needed.

      Where TCO really shines is in all the tail calls that aren't replacements for loops: an optimized tail call is faster than a non-optimized tail call. And in real world applications, a lot of your calls are tail calls!

      I don't necessarily love the feature, for the reasons that I detailed in the previous post. But it's not a terrible problem, and I think it at makes sense as an optimization within the context of Lua's design goals of being lightweight and fast.

  • znpy  7 hours ago

    No offence but it seems that all of the people that are replying to this comment are essentially screaming in the void, if anything among each other.

    I scrolled most of this sub thread and gp seem to not be replying to any of the replies they got.

nxobject  21 minutes ago

+1 for the incredibly niche (but otherwise make-it-or-break-it) fact that PUC-Rio is and likely always will be strict C89 (i.e. ANSI C). I think this was (and still is?) most relevant to gamedev on Windows using older versions of MSVC, which has until recently been a few pennies short of a full C99 implementation.

I did once manage to compile Lua 5.4 on a Macintosh SE with 4MB of RAM, and THINK C 5.0 (circa 1991), which was a sick trick. Unfortunately, it took about 30 seconds for the VM to fully initialize, and it couldn't play well with the classic MacOS MMU-less handle-based memory management scheme.

brabel  20 hours ago

> it feels like it departs from what people know without good reasons.

Lua was first released in 1993. I think that it's pretty conventional for the time, though yeah it did not follow Algol syntax but Pascal's and Ada's (which were more popular in Brazil at the time than C, which is why that is the case)!

Ruby, which appeared just 2 years later, departs a lot more, arguably without good reasons either? Perl, which is 5 years older and was very popular at the time, is much more "different" than Lua from what we now consider mainstream.

  • rwmj  19 hours ago

    We had a lot problems embedding Ruby in a multithreaded C program as the garbage collector tries to scan memory between the threads (more details here: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit/-/commit/7364cbaae809b5ffb6... )

    Perl, Python, OCaml, Lua and Rust were all fine (Rust wasn't around in 2010 of course).

    • rurban  8 hours ago

      I'm reving _why's syck right now. Turns out my fork from 2013 was still the most advanced. It doesn't implement the latest YAML specs, and all of it's new insecurities, which is a good thing. And it's much, much faster than the sax-like libyaml.

      But since syck uses the ruby hashtable internally, I got stuck in the gem for a while. It fell out of their stdlib, and is not really maintained neither. PHP had the latest updates for it. And perl (me) extended it to be more recursion safe, and added more policies (what to do on duplicate keys: skip or overwrite).

      So the ruby bindings are troublesome because of its GC, which with threading requires now7 a global vm instance. And using the ruby alloc/free pairs.

      PHP, perl, python, Lua, IO, cocoa, all no problem. Just ruby, because of its too tight coupling. Looks I have to decouple it finally from ruby.

  • rapind  17 hours ago

    > Ruby, which appeared just 2 years later, departs a lot more, arguably without good reasons either?

    I doubt we ever would have heard about Ruby without it's syntax decisions. From my understanding it's entire raison d'être was readability.

  • nurettin  12 hours ago 

        def ruby(is)
      it = is 
      a = "bad"
      example()
      begin
        it["had"] = pascal(:like)
      rescue
        flow
      end
    end

  • a-french-anon  7 hours ago

    I don't think you understand his point. Ruby has a different syntax because it presents different/more language features than a very basic C-like language; it's inspired by Lisp/SmallTalk, after all. Lua doesn't but still decided to change its looks a lot, according to him.

rweichler  20 hours ago

I read this comment, about to snap back with an anecdote how I as a 13 year old was able to learn Lua quite easily, and then I stopped myself because that wasn't productive, then pondered what antirez might think of this comment, and then I realized that antirez wrote it.

  • aidenn0  18 hours ago

    I think the older you are the harder Lua is to learn. GP didn't say it made wrong choices, just choices that are gratuitously different from other languages in the Algol family.

  • le-mark  16 hours ago

    I’m tickled that one of my favorite developers is commenting on another of my favorites work. Would be great if Nicolas Cannasse were also in this thread!

CapsAdmin  15 hours ago

It sounds like you're trying to articulate why you don't like Lua, but it seems to just boil down to syntax and semantics unfamiliarity?

I see this argument a lot with Lua. People simply don't like its syntax because we live in a world where C style syntax is more common, and the departure from that seem unnecessary. So going "well actually, in 1992 when Lua was made, C style syntax was more unfamiliar" won't help, because in the current year, C syntax is more familiar.

The first language I learned was Lua, and because of that it seems to have a special place in my heart or something. The reason for this is because in around 2006, the sandbox game "Garry's Mod" was extended with scripting support and chose Lua for seemingly the same reasons as Redis.

The game's author famously didn't like Lua, its unfamiliarity, its syntax, etc. He even modified it to add C style comments and operators. His new sandbox game "s&box" is based on C#, which is the language closest to his heart I think.

The point I'm trying to make is just that Lua is familiar to me and not to you for seemingly no objective reason. Had Garry chosen a different language, I would likely have a different favorite language, and Lua would feel unfamiliar and strange to me.

  • junon  15 hours ago

    GP is the creator of Redis. I would imagine he knows Lua well given that Redis has embedded it for around a decade.

    • CapsAdmin  14 hours ago

      In that case, my point about Garry not liking Lua despite choosing it for Garrysmod, for seemingly the same reason as antirez is very appropriate.

      I haven't read antirez'/redis' opinions about Lua, so I'm just going off of his post.

      In contrast I do know more about what Garry's opinion on Lua is as I've read his thoughts on it over many years. It ultimately boils down to what antirez said. He just doesn't like it, it's too unfamiliar for seemingly no intentional reason.

      But Lua is very much an intentionally designed language, driven in cathedral-style development by a bunch of professors who seem to obsess about language design. Some people like it, some people don't, but over 15 years of talking about Lua to other developers, "I don't like the syntax" is ultimately the fundamental reason I hear from developers.

      So my main point is that it just feels arbitrary. I'm confident the main reason I like Lua is because garry's mod chose to implement it. Had it been "MicroQuickJS", Lua would likely feel unfamiliar to me as well.

      1 reply →

cxr  20 hours ago

It wouldn't fix the issue of semantics, but "language skins"[1][2] are an underexplored area of programming language development.

People go through all this effort to separate parsing and lexing, but never exploit the ability to just plug in a different lexer that allows for e.g. "{" and "}" tokens instead of "then" and "end", or vice versa.

1. <https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&prefix=true&query=cxr%2...>

2. <https://old.reddit.com/r/Oberon/comments/1pcmw8n/is_this_sac...>

  • nine_k  20 hours ago

    Not "never exploit"; Reason and BuckleScript are examples of different "language skins" for OCaml.

    The problem with "skins" is that they create variety where people strive for uniformity to lower the cognitive load. OTOH transparent switching between skins (about as easy as changing the tab sizes) would alleviate that.

    • brabel  19 hours ago

      > OTOH transparent switching between skins (about as easy as changing the tab sizes) would alleviate that.

      That's one of my hopes for the future of the industry: people will be able to just choose the code style and even syntax family (which you're calling skin) they prefer when editing code, and it will be saved in whatever is the "default" for the language (or even something like the Unison Language: store the AST directly which allows cool stuff like de-duplicating definitions and content-addressable code - an idea I first found out on the amazing talk by Joe Armstrong, "The mess we're in" [1]).

      Rust, in particular, would perhaps benefit a lot given how a lot of people hate its syntax... but also Lua for people who just can't stand the Pascal-like syntax and really need their C-like braces to be happy.

      [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4

      1 reply →

    • dualogy  7 hours ago

      > transparent switching between skins (about as easy as changing the tab sizes)

      One of my pet "not today but some day" project ideas. In my case, I wanted to give Python/Gdscript syntax to any & all the curly languages (a potential boon to all users of non-Anglo keyboard layouts), one by one, via VSCode extension that implements a virtual filesystem over the real one which translates back & forth the syntaxes during the load/edit/save cycle. Then the whole live LSP background running for the underlying real source files and resurfacing that in the same extension with line-number matchings etc.

      Anyone, please steal this idea and run with it, I'm too short on time for it for now =)

      1 reply →

  • rao-v  18 hours ago

    One day Brython (python with braces allowing copy paste code to autoindent) will be well supported by LSPs and world peace will ensure

vegabook  15 hours ago

Lua has been a wild success considering it was born in Brazil, and not some high wealth, network-effected country with all its consequent influential muscle (Ruby? Python? C? Rust? Prolog? Pascal? APL? Ocaml? Show me which one broke out that wasn't "born in the G7"). We should celebrate its plucky success which punches waaay above its adoption weight. It didn't blindly lockstep ALGOL citing "adooooption!!", but didn't indulge in revolution either, and so treads a humble path of cooperative independence of thought.

Come to think of it I don't think I can name a single mainstream language other than Lua that wasn't invented in the G7.

  • s3graham  10 hours ago

    I appreciate your point, but Python was invented in .nl which wouldn't be G7 strictly speaking.

kiririn  2 hours ago

I’m always surprised people pick Lua when Pawn exists. I think I’d even still choose it over MicroQuickJS

https://www.compuphase.com/pawn/pawn.htm

  • bnolsen  16 minutes ago

    I remember seeing this a long time ago and liking it, I just didn't have a use for it at the time. How does it stack up against luahit for perf and memory, and threading? It also looks like it could be worth looking at porting the compiler to zig which excels at both compiler writing and cross platform tooling.

Hendrikto  5 hours ago

> If this had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua.

Thank god it wasn’t then.

garganzol  19 hours ago

JavaScript in 2010 was a totally different beast, standartization-wise. Lots of sharp corners and blank spaces were still there.

So, even if an implementation like MicroQuickJS existed in 2010, it's unlikely that too many people would have chosen JS over Lua, given all the shortcomings that JavaScript had at the time.

  • kybernetikos  5 hours ago

    While you're not wrong that JS has come a long way in that time, it's not the case that it was an extremely unusual choice at the time - Ryan Dahl chose it for node in 2009.

rwmj  19 hours ago

Out of interest, was Tcl considered? It's the original embeddable language.

  • rogerbinns  18 hours ago

    In 1994 at the second WWW conference we presented "An API to Mosaic". It was TCL embedded inside the (only![1]) browser at the time - Mosaic. The functionality available was substantially similar to what Javascript ended up providing. We used it in our products especially for integrating help and preferences - for example HTML text could be describing color settings, you could click on one, select a colour from the chooser and the page and setting in our products would immediately update. In another demo we were able to print multiple pages of content from the start page, and got a standing ovation! There is an alternate universe where TCL could have become the browser language.

    For those not familiar with TCL, the C API is flavoured like main. Callbacks take a list of strings argv style and an argc count. TCL is stringly typed which sounds bad, but the data comes from strings in the HTML and script blocks, and the page HTML is also text, so it fits nicely and the C callbacks are easy to write.

    [1] Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released the week before

dustbunny  15 hours ago

I also strongly disliked luas syntax at first but now I feel like the meta tables and what not and pcall and all that stuff is kinda worth it. I like everything about Lua except some of the awkward syntax but I find it so much better then JS, but I haven't been a web dev in over a decade

  • junon  15 hours ago

    The only thing I dislike about Lua is the 1-indexing. I know they had reasons for it but it always caused issues.

    • silisili  9 hours ago

      I'm torn on this.

      Initially I agreed, just because so many other languages do it that way.

      But if you ignore that and clean slate it, IMO, 1 based makes more sense. I feel like 0 based mainly gained foothold because of C's bastardization of arrays vs pointers and associated tricks. But most other languages don't even support that.

      You can only see :len(x)-1 so many times before you realize how ridiculous it is.

      4 replies →

petters  6 hours ago

Lua having a JIT compiler seems like a big difference though. It was a while since that got major updates, but probably relevant at the time?

spacechild1  19 hours ago

> it feels like it departs from what people know without good reasons.

Lua is a pretty old language. In 1993 the world had not really settled on C style syntax. Compared to Perl or Tcl, Lua's syntax seems rather conventional.

Some design decisions might be a bit unusual, but overall the language feels very consistent and predictable. JS is a mess in comparison.

> because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax

Huh? Lua's syntax is actually very Algol-like since it uses keywords to delimit blocks (e.g. if ... then ... end)

  • lucketone  19 hours ago

    I known for very long time that c (and co) inherited the syntax from algol.

    But only after long time I tried to check what Algol actually looked like. To my surprise, Algol does not look anything like C to me.

    I would be quite interested in the expanded version of “C has inherited syntax from Algol”

    Edit: apparently the inheritance from Algol is a formula: lexical scoping + value returning functions (expression based) - parenthesitis. Only last item is about visual part of the syntax.

    Algol alternatives were: cobol, fortan, lisp, apl.

    • spacechild1  18 hours ago

      The use of curly braces for delimiting blocks of code actually comes from BCPL.

      Of course, C also inherited syntax from Algol, but so did most languages.

  • lioeters  19 hours ago

    > consistent and predictable

    That's what matters to me, not how similar Lua is to other languages, but that the language is well-designed in its own system of rules and conventions. It makes sense, every part of it contributes to a harmonious whole. JavaScript on the other hand.

    When speaking of Algol or C-style syntax, it makes me imagine a "Common C" syntax, like taking the best, or the least common denominator, of all C-like languages. A minimal subset that fits in your head, instead of what modern C is turning out to be, not to mention C++ or Rust.

IshKebab  20 hours ago

Not to mention the 1-based indexing sin. JavaScript has a lot of WTFs but they got that right at least.

  • nine_k  19 hours ago

    This indeed is not Algol (or rather C) heritage, but Fortran heritage, not memory offsets but indices in mathematical formulae. This is why R and Julia also have 1-based indexing.

    • cmrdporcupine  17 hours ago

      Pascal. Modula-2. BASIC. Hell, Logo.

      Lately, yes, Julia and R.

      Lots of systems I grew up with were 1-indexed and there's nothing wrong with it. In the context of history, C is the anomaly.

      I learned the Wirth languages first (and then later did a lot of programming in MOO, a prototype OO 1-indexed scripting language). Because of that early experience I still slip up and make off by 1 errors occasionally w/ 0 indexed languages.

      (Actually both Modula-2 and Ada aren't strictly 1 indexed since you can redefine the indexing range.)

      It's funny how orthodoxies grow.

      7 replies →

  • bigstrat2003  15 hours ago

    There's nothing wrong with 1-based indexing. The only reason it seems wrong to you is because you're familiar with 0-based, not because it's inherently worse.

hnlmorg  18 hours ago

[flagged]

  • DebugDruid  15 hours ago

    I think criticizing JavaScript has become a way of signaling "I'm a good programmer." Yes, good programmers ten years ago had valid reasons to criticize it. But today, attacking the efforts of skilled engineers who have improved the language (given the constraints and without breaking half of the web) seems unfair. They’ve achieved a Herculean task compared to the Python dev team, which has broken backward compatibility so many times yet failed to create a consistent language, lacking a single right way to do many things.

    • hnlmorg  13 hours ago

      > But today, attacking the efforts of skilled engineers who have improved the language (given the constraints and without breaking half of the web) seems unfair.

      I was criticising a thing not a person.

      Also your comment implies it was ok to be critical of a language 10 years ago but not ok today because a few more language designers might get offended. Which is a weird argument to make.

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