Comment by behnamoh 17 hours ago
I don't know man, every time I tried to learn Lua (to write nvim plugins and HammerSpoon spoons) I disliked the ergonomics of the language. I don't understand why people say it's an easy language—
easy ≠ simpleAgain, tastes. I found Erlang to be one of the easiest languages I ever used. I just immediately "got" it. Unfortunately I've had very few professional opportunities to use it.
Erlang has multiple higher level barrier of entries than other languages. For starting, its syntax.
It all depends on what you been exposed to in the past, right? I find Lua simple because it is a minimalist language in which there are very few things to learn. You can buy "Programming in Lua" for the version you want to use and with a single book you learn about basically all of the language and its internals. That is not the same with some other languages.
There are languages that compile to Lua. Have you investigated those? For example, you can use a TypeScript syntax and pick up free typechecking along the way: https://typescripttolua.github.io/
There's also the venerable MoonScript: https://moonscript.org/
And YueScript, a personal fave: https://yuescript.org/doc/
A whole list: https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages
it's easy, but the 1 indexes and global by default suck
I wrote about this in:
https://andregarzia.com/2021/01/lua-a-misunderstood-language...
I like 1 based indexes and the globals don't hurt me on my projects. It is like JS, it has its own bits that are different than other languages, once you learn them you see that it is mostly fine.
The 1 indexes are only a difference from what you're used to. Lua was made by mathematicians, who of course wanted to address the first element as 1, the second element as 2, etc.
0-indexing makes sense in the context of C where the index operator is syntactic sugar for pointer arithmetic. In higher-level languages like C# and Python and others, it's pretty much just a leftover habit from C devs that we all got used to.
Global by default is a perpetual issue, agreed.
> The 1 indexes are only a difference from what you're used to
The left handed scissors are only a difference from what you're used to.
> Lua was made by mathematicians
The default value is nil and using nil as an index on a table returns nil. Yet nil + number is not valid and results in a runtime error.
> it's pretty much just a leftover habit from C devs
It's reflective of the fact that these languages are either intended to work with C APIs or are implemented in C itself. This makes writing FFI and extensions _far_ easier than it would be otherwise.
You are correct that 1-based indexing is the norm among mathematicians, but none of the creators of Lua is a mathematician, AFAIK. You can read about the early history of Lua here:
Lua is the scripting language of [Recoil]. I've been writing some fairly complex game code on it for a few years now, I lost a lot of prejudice over time on 1-indexing.
In fact, at least for this application I've come to enjoy its practicality!
Perhaps people's tastes vary? I find Lua an easy to use language. Easy to embed into C/C++ projects for scripting purposes. Also great when you can only spare 100 kB or so for an interpreter. (Arguably that was more important in the past.)