Re: modules, require, magic

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 11:53 AM, joao lobato <btnfdp.lobato@gmail.com> wrote:
> and still end up with more functionality; in a way I was alluding that
> we never had a dostring

Ah but we did - it got dropped ;)

> Globals tend to be dangerous, you have no guarantees regarding what
> part of the script can end up mucking your state;

Amen to that. One way of deciding this in a large system is to ask the
question "how much damage can a misspelling do?".  You end up having
to practically ban globals.

Fortunately, the Lua community is not so gung-ho about
'monkey-patching' which seems to be a frequent cause of problems among
the Rubyistas.

> Of course the point loses much of its weight for small scripts with a
> single developer.

Yes, so when we hear criticism from someone like Mark Hamburg you know
it comes from someone who handles hundreds of thousands of lines of
Lua.

Big Lua requires serious discipline!  And it's harder to do it
afterwards, as I found with the mere 10K lines of source for Penlight.

steve d.