... that is the strangest collection of complaints I've ever seen about Lua. He obsesses over minor syntactic quibbles like the lack of a += operator and the ~= and "not" instead of C's inexplicable exclamation marks (how does this man stand SQL?) but he doesn't dwell on Lua's bigger flaws.
I mean, 1-based arrays, weird scoping and the pairs/ipairs thing seems far more serious than the lack of a proper conditional operator (how long did Python go before it got a conditional operator?)
Lua is everything it was meant to be - a lightweight, user-friendly, safe language that runs nice and fast in spite of being very hashtable-oriented. There's a good reason it's heavily used as a scripting language for game engines and other platforms that need to let users run code provided by other users - a more "batteries-included" language would have users wiping each other's filesystems.
I mean, 1-based arrays, weird scoping and the pairs/ipairs thing seems far more serious than the lack of a proper conditional operator (how long did Python go before it got a conditional operator?)
Lua is everything it was meant to be - a lightweight, user-friendly, safe language that runs nice and fast in spite of being very hashtable-oriented. There's a good reason it's heavily used as a scripting language for game engines and other platforms that need to let users run code provided by other users - a more "batteries-included" language would have users wiping each other's filesystems.