Thank you for Lua

[Steve Litt <slitt@...>]

Hi all,

Thank you for Lua. I've used it only about 10 days and so far love it. Here's 
why...

It's clean and simple! There's very little syntax to learn because there are 
very few features. The idea of building all complex data on top of tables 
(hashes, linked lists, whatever they're called in other languages) is 
brilliant. Arbitrarily complex data structures can be built easily and 
readably from tables. Starting from 1 instead of 0 reduces the opportunity for 
picket fence errors. Having tables with numeric subscripts plus text data 
fields is so much simpler than having to make a class with an array and 
additional data fields (start, end, length etc). The fact that it's trivial to 
pass functions around like any other data makes for a much easier world, as 
anyone who's done this stuff in C or Perl can tell you.

Learning Lua is like getting a free computer science data structures class. I 
used Ruby for awhile and never understood iterators. A couple days with Lua 
and iterators are obvious. I've read about closures for years and not known 
what they were. A week with Lua solved that.

It's too bad Lua doesn't have static variables like C. Oh wait a minute, you 
can do that with closures, and you can even have multiple identical functions 
each with their own "static variables". Nicely done!

I'm still shaky on metatables and metafunctions, and haven't yet interfaced to 
C. In other words, even without using Lua's best features, I'm already in love 
with the language.

If any of you are in Orlando, Florida, USA on 1/5/2011 the Greater Orlando 
Linux User Group (GoLUG) is having a Lua presentation by Zane Pickett:

http://golug.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

GoLUG has several game developers who are frothing at the mouth to learn Lua, 
so it's going to be a good meeting. If you're in or near Orlando, we look 
forward to meeting you.

And keep up the good work!

SteveT

Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt