Re: Abominations of nature

[Thomas Breuel <tmbdev@...>]

On Aug 23, 2007, at 4:22 PM, Tom Barta wrote:

On 8/23/07, Thomas Breuel <tmbdev@gmail.com> wrote:

I think approaches like this are fundamentally flawed: you're spending a lot of effort to shoe-horn an interaction into control structures that it takes a Ph.D. to understand and that are essentially black boxes.

Most of computer science is based around the principle of abstraction...

Sorry, I wasn't being clear; I have nothing against abstraction.  What I'm saying is that if you express the interaction as code, all you can do with it is run it.  If you express it as data, you can, in addition, build tools to edit, visualize, and manipulate it.

But don't discount an idea just because it's difficult to understand/implement (otherwise, we probably wouldn't have most modern programming languages in the first place). 

But I do, because the reason we're using Lua is that it's simple and small.  The more complicated Lua becomes as a language, the less useful it becomes for us.

Cheers,

Thomas.