Re: Why I leave Lua (Was: Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (work3) now available)

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

On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 2:44 PM, David Demelier <demelier.david@gmail.com> wrote:
> but now I think I'll just leave the land of scripting languages at all, at
> the beginning I was thinking of switching to V8 but I think I'll just stick
> with plain C++.

I used to think that C++ could stretch from the big to the small, and
was sufficiently expressive for 'scripting' as well as 'application'
roles.  I appreciated John Ousterhout's idea of 'glue languages' but
not his solution (Tcl) or his Dichotomy.  The C++ solution required a
C++ interpreter [1] so that a host C++ program could still run C++
scripts quickly without compile overhead.

Since then, I've come to believe that it's better when the glue
language is sufficiently different to make the levels distinct;  that
Lua is much more expressive than C++, at least if not at too large a
scale [2].  But this does require the ability to easily switch between
languages without wanting one to be more like the other....

steve d.

[1] UnderC. Nearly drove me mad. But it's cool having a C++ REPL and
it was the core of a 'conversational' course in C++ I published.
[2] Large-scale Lua probably requires more discipline than a
statically-typed language, but it can be done.