Lua on Reddit again

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fc1ym/steve_litts_lua_laboratory_an_interesting_look_at/

(Well, somebody has to read Reddit so other people can be productive)

Some of the quotes should be familiar to us regulars. As to why Lua
has not 'taken off':

[[There is no bunch of business types hyping it as the next silver
bullet. Lua is a fantastic language, but there is no hype so the
sheeple don't use it. There's more to market share than quality
unfortunately. I don't mind tho, Lua is great, let the ignorant use
perl/python/ruby; no loss to Lua users.

I've said elsewhere, I don't mind the 1-based thing, I even appreciate
it sometimes, but yeah the control syntax could be reworked.

Maybe it would be a different language that would compile to Lua
(coffeeLua), but what I'd like to see is a lighter function and block
syntax, and a lighter, more expression-based control structure syntax.
It would probably require a reworking of scope rules, maybe a hard
look at return, but it could be done, and the result would be the most
glorious language ever.
]]

The 'we don't want popularity' meme, together with syntax changes.  I
suppose once a curly bracket person, always a curly bracket person ...

Another short response to that question:
[[
    * No Java-like OO
    * No string support, only 1byte char lists.
    * Awkward syntax
    * Meta-tables makes people feel uncomfortable
]]

People seem to be very definite about their comfort zone with
programming languages!

steve d.