Re: Lua Strengths/Weaknesses and usage info

[Christian Vogler <cvogler@...>]

On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 09:51:25AM +0100, Reuben Thomas wrote:
> Granted, and there are a lot more like this. But this still seems to be
> about the libraries rather than the language; I'm interested to know if
> you think that Lua is *inherently* more verbose than Perl or Python.

That depends on what criterion of verbosity you use. For
object-oriented programming it is, because the class mechanisms are
not built into the language. For functional and imperative programming
I think that lua could be roughly even with Perl and Python if it had
better libraries.

Two notes: First, I'm not counting block begin and block end markers
toward verbosity. Python does not need them, but I don't think that
the difference in lines of code (LOC) is enough to make programming in
one language more cumbersome than another. Second, I am assuming that
you want to write readable and maintainable Perl, not line-noise.

> Personally, I struggled with Perl for 2 or 3 years of occasional use, and
> each time I came back to it I'd forgotten some key bits of magic, and
> spent most of my time while writing trivial scripts looking these up in
> the Camel book, which in some ways is not a good reference work.

This is why I like Python so much. It is a quite clean language,
although it has more warts than lua. There is no "magic" to remember,
and on top of that it has very powerful standard libraries.

- Christian