Comment by 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
The only thing I dislike about Lua is the 1-indexing. I know they had reasons for it but it always caused issues.
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.
0 based has a LOT of benefits whereas the reasoning, if I recall, for 1-indexing in Lua was to make the language more approachable to non-devs.
Having written a game in it (via LÖVE), the 1-indexing was a continued source of problems. On the other hand, I rarely need to use len-1, especially since most languages expose more readable methods such as `last()`.
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Python got this right. Zero-based indexing combined with half-open slice notation means as a practical matter you don't see too many -1s in the code. Certainly far fewer than when I wrote a game in Löve for a gamejam, where screen co-ordinates are naturally zero-indexed, which has implications for everything onscreen (tile indices, sprites, ...)
I could live with 1-indexing but a closed range array unpack (slices) is quite big toll and breaks nice intuitive invariant.