Comment by 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.
Is modern C really much more complicated than old C? C++ is a mess of course.
I don't write modern C for daily use, so I can't really say. But I've been re-learning and writing C99 more these days, not professionally but personal use - and I appreciate the smallness of the language. Might even say C peaked at C99. I mean, I'd be crazy to say that C-like languages after C99, like Java, PHP, etc., are all misguided for how unnecessarily big and complex they are. It might be that I'm becoming more like a caveman programmer as I get older, I prefer dumb primitive tools.
C11 adds a couple of nice things like static asserts which I use sometimes to document assumptions I make.
They did add some optional sections like bounds checking that seem to have flopped, partly for being optional, partly for being half-baked. Having optional sections in general seems like a bad idea.
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IDK about C11; but C99 doesn't change a lot compared to ANSI C. You can read The C Programming Language 2nd edition and pick up C99 in a week. It adds boleans, some float/complex math ops, an optional floating point definition and a few more goodies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C99
C++ by comparison it's a behemoth. If C++ died and, for instance, the FLTK guys rebased their libraries into C (and Boost for instance) it would be a big loss at first but Chromium and the like rewritten in C would slim down a bit, the complexity would plummet down and similar projects would use far less CPU and RAM.
It's not just about the binary size; C++ today makes even the Common Lisp standard (even with UIOP and some de facto standard libraries from QuickLisp) pretty much human-manageable, and CL always has been a one-thousand pages thick standard with tons of bloat compared to Scheme or it's sibling Emacs Lisp. Go figure.
C++ is a katamari ball of programming trends and half baked ideas. I get why google built golang, as they were already pretty strict about what parts of the c++ sediments you were allowed to use.
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