Re: Propsoal: a lua dialect without nil

[Steve Litt <slitt@...>]

On Wednesday 16 February 2011 03:50:33 Dirk Laurie wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 02:12:19AM +0200, Miles Bader wrote:
> > Pro:  One less subject for long flamey threads on this list
> > 
> > Con:  language becomes more complex, harder to learn, and less concise:
> > Con:  more annoying to program in:
> 
> > Con:  less efficient:
> Absolutely.  Very well summarized.
> 
> The one thing I can't understand about threads like:
>     -- nil is confusing, replace it by something else
>     -- implicit conversion is evil, get rid of it
>     -- table as only data stucture is inadequate, let's have some more
>     -- index origin 1 is silly, it should be 0
> is that such debates generate so much traffic, and respawn every now
> and then, despite being so utterly futile.  The Lua team is never going
> to change any of those.

And regarding your four bullet points above, if someone agrees with those 
bullet points, why are they using Lua? There's no shortage of languages depart 
from those four bullet points.

Personally, to me, the first three of those bullet points are what make Lua so 
darned good. Let me quote from the Wikipedia page at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)#Features:

"Lua is commonly described as a “multi-paradigm” language, providing a small 
set of general features that can be extended to fit different problem types, 
rather than providing a more complex and rigid specification to match a single 
paradigm."

That says it all. Lua gives a few extensible building blocks that are 
efficient and memorable. You know, like nil is false, implicit conversion, 
tables, metatables and closures. Use it for a week and you don't need to 
program with the manual on your screen -- it's memorable and not surprising. 
Because of stuff like nil, implicit conversion and do-everything tables.

I'm a refugee from Perl, which is a whole lot better than some languages, but 
still nowhere as clean and easy as Lua. I'm soooooo glad to have Lua, and as a 
Perl refugee can't imagine why anyone would want to clutter up Lua for the 
sake of some computer science truism.

SteveT

Steve Litt
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