Re: I like Lua the way it is

[Steve Litt <slitt@...>]

On Sat, 10 Mar 2012 08:49:50 +0200
Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:

> >
> > 1 will makes lua has native meta-layer. but it needs careful
> > implement, and need roberto agrees.
> >
> 
> I'm not picking on the above in particular.  I quote it merely as
> one example of too many posts recently that want to change Lua.
> It gives the impression that lua-l is populated by people all
> unhappy with Lua in general and Lua 5.2 in particular.  All
> that when PiL3 has not even come out yet.
> 
> Just to show that we are not all like that, I wish to say:
> 
>    * I like Lua the way it is!*
> 
> Roberto, Luiz, and Waldemar the Silent: keep it up just the
> way you always have.  It's great!
> 
> Dirk

I agree that I like Lua the way it is. Sure, it could have this and
that, but humans are adept at adjusting to programming languages, and
Lua's about as useful as they get. I've found two deficiencies in Lua:

1) Lack of a continue statement. An hour of programming produced a
nice, generic "relevant lines" object that completely replaced a
continue statement.

2) Lack of tools and frameworks such as you find on CPAN. But this has
nothing to do with the language itself.

Everyone wants their own pet feature. The beautiful thing about Lua is
it's simple enough, efficient enough, and featureful enough to easily
program a pet feature totally within Lua, or even as a C addon.
Therefore, I like Lua just the way it is.

SteveT