Re: I like Lua the way it is

[Rena <hyperhacker@...>]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 14:43, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> 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
>

Yeah, I'd love a continue statement too, but I guess goto does the job
just as well. (Although I haven't migrated my projects to 5.2 yet...)

I think it's good that people talk about changing Lua, because it
gives people ideas. I come up with some interesting ideas from time to
time, and to implement them in Lua itself would be ridiculous - but
it's something you could do in a new, Lua-like language, or a custom
variation of Lua. So Lua serves not only as a great language itself,
but as a great base platform for new languages. Maybe someone will
make a language that looks a lot like Lua, but has different goals
than Lua's trying to stay as simple and lightweight as possible, so
ideas that would be "too much" for Lua would be right at home there.

When people talk about new features, I don't think they mean "Lua
should have X" so much as "what would it be like if Lua had X?" or "I
wonder if you could get X to work in Lua", or even "X could be a good
feature for a Lua-like language". And from those thoughts and
discussions, all sorts of interesting ideas can arise, and from ideas
are born such nice things as, say, Lua itself. :-)

-- 
Sent from my toaster.