Re: Clean Lua

[Francesco Abbate <francesco.bbt@...>]

2011/11/20 Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com>:
> For the first few replies after I posted I was quite sorry I did, since
> some people did "bicker about" 5.2 instead of helping to pin down
> Clean Lua (which I actually thought was a cool idea, sorry you didn't
> seem to like it much late on a Saturday night).
>
> Then came some very enlightening posts by Petite Abeille, David
> Manura and Steve Donovan.  I hope your reaction to my post did
> not stop you from reading theirs.

I'm personally not interested to "clean Lua" because the fact itself
that we need a clean subset of Language means that the language is
"wrong" in some aspects.

This is especially true for Javascript for example, which is known to
have many "wrong" features. For Javascript it is therefore quite
compelling to choose a subset of the language and some good practices
(See "Douglas Crockford, "Javascript: the good part").

Since I like a lot the Lua programming language I would like to have
it right, I don't want a bad programming language to choose a clean
subset. I consider that Lua 5.1 is already an excellent programming
language and I was therefore expressing my concerning about changes
introduced with Lua 5.2.

Please note that to design the programming language "right" is
absolutely crtitical for being successfull. I believe that Python is
an excellent example where they have made a lot of "right" design
decisions to shape an excellent and successfull programming language.

Lua is also another example of right design decisions that made a
successfull programming language. The difference with Python was that
Lua focused on being small, fast and with a clean design.

Note also that if it was possible for Lua to have an outstanding JIT
compiler it was because the programming language itself has a very
good and clean design.

If you say: "I don't care about how Lua changes because I can choose a
clean subset" this means that you don't understand the stake. Python
understood this point so well that they thoroughly discuss each
language enhancement proposal (PEP) in an open discussion.

I know that for Lua the decisions are taken by Roberto and Luiz and
they have the right of doing so but I have the right to express my
point of view.

Francesco