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Like everything else Lua obeys the laws of Entropy and so must "bloat". The question is how? By obeying its own internal Design "laws" it remains efficient, remains embeddable. Python Java etc are anything but embeddable the way Lua is. A consequence is as said "very repetitive patterns". A solution is as said "libraries", and that's standard practice anyway. Let it remain the prokaryote it is. Thanks. 


On 22/09/14 08:25, Thierry@spoludo wrote:

‎The initial request was all about testing. It is presented comparatively to python but this practice starts from java. Mainly it is about unit testing. So having a solution based on the debug api isn't that of a trouble  although it shall be documented everywhere as a best practice.

Part of the slow adoption of any dynamic language is due to the fear of lack of safety in the development, and that this may not scale with larger teams. So what would be a geometric improvement in this regard ? Looking at typescript  or alike (swift) one may have one indication.

Then not very costly syntactic add-on could largely increase the attraction of the language, things such as ! = and allowing var as an alternate to local keyword. How much the few extra bytes in the parser would be considered a bloat?

There are also some very repetitive patterns (enforced user code bloat ?) to use in Lua, that may be simplified with libraries/syntax. Out of my mind I can't recollect them all, but certainly  array manipulation (init, range, slices...) are far more verbose in Lua whilst very common in any program.



   Original Message
From: Tim Hill
Sent: lundi 22 septembre 2014 09:41
To: Lua mailing list
Reply To: Lua mailing list
Subject: Re: Bloat or no bloat? (Was: [Feature request])


On Sep 21, 2014, at 11:20 PM, Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:


Actually, the main point of my post was not to provide a Bourbakian
definition of "bloat" but to say that supporting ideas that Roberto has
already indicated he is considering is may well be a productive way
of getting new features into Lua.


This is bloat: a recipe to get new features into Lua, regardless what
you think about them :-)

-- Roberto



Now come, come. As others have said “bloat” is somewhat subjective. I would offer my own interpretation: “good” features are those that extend the language geometrically, while “poor” features are those that extend it linearly. I would argue that historically this has been the primary criteria for adding features. And many of the “lively” discussions here been about if a feature is geometric or linear.

This is not a critique btw, it’s a complement.

—Tim