Re: Ruby philosophy vs Lua philosophy

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 6:29 PM, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Feb 2013 18:59:13 +0100
> Ico <lua@zevv.nl> wrote:
> I learned Ruby first, but I never understood iterators until learning
> Lua, because Ruby's iterator syntax is so magical, black boxy, and
> removed from its function.
>
> SteveT
>


I love the Stackexchange post that someone wrote (I wish I could find
and attribute), regarding the use of Lua for web development. It went
along the lines of:

If you are the kind of guy who likes to be productive quickly and
early and don't need to understand everything about what you are doing
or what is happening; use Ruby or Python. You risk complecting things
[1], however. If you're the kind of person who likes to understand the
entire language and everything about what is going on, then use Lua.
The language is small enough to fit in your head, but composable
enough to give you the needed power. It lacks a huge number of
libraries, but most likely has what you need.

One thing I will note is that the age of some really useful libraries
is some times more than a year old. In fact, most of the really useful
things in Lua are extremely "old."

I put old in quotes, because that's how a stable, simple system looks
to the rest of the world.

Simple isn't easy.

-Andrew


1: https://github.com/newhavenrb/conferences/wiki/Rich-Hickey-Keynote