Re: Has Lua reached perfection?

[KHMan <keinhong@...>]

On 1/28/2018 10:04 AM, Paige DePol wrote:
> KHMan wrote:
>
> > On 1/28/2018 8:52 AM, Coda Highland wrote:
> > Perfection? No. I agree with what Peter said. When younger, I would help with this kind of cheerleading. Now, not so much. When younger, I was suitably impressed when reading about the beautiful conceptual elegance of Lisp. Now, not so much. Things change.
> >
> > I want a switch construct! I want a switch construct! I want a switch construct!
> >
> > :-) :-p
>
> I wrote one of those[1] and it wound up being quite performant... of course
> you probably mean you'd like it in vanilla Lua, but I can't help there! ;)

Yeah, I reckon we'll have to make more noise then. :-) Lemme get 
some pots and pans...

These days I like "no surprises" and being able to clearly express 
things in code. After all, Lua is not competing in the JIT 
pedal-to-the-metal race, and neither is it going 
super-linguistic-expressive as in Perl 5. I'm not so gung-ho on 
"minimal" these days.

Switch constructs are almost ubiquitous. For many things, the 
brain wants to construct code like a switch statement. Being able 
to express an idea clearly as a switch construct is better than 
shoehorning the thing into a mass of if-then statements, or worse. 
For me, performance is now a secondary consideration.

How many other major languages that avoids having a switch 
construct are there? Lua puts in a utf8 library but not a switch 
construct?

Clear and unambiguous code is a good thing to have. We want to be 
in control of our mass of code, and not the other way round. 
(Slightly OT: This week, an Ariane 5 likely launched perfectly on 
a wrong heading, flew almost over spectators at Kourou beach, and 
mission control appeared to have minimal situational awareness. 
Who wants to bet it's related to software engineering and 
processes, like last November's Soyuz/Fregat failure? And how much 
do you trust software driving your car today?)

So given a choice between "minimal is elegant" and "clear 
expression of ideas", guess what I would choose.


> The only restriction with the patch is the 'jumpto' command does not jump
> to labels outside the current block, however, that is something I will be
> fixing and posting an update for fairly soon.
>
> ~Paige
>
> [1] https://github.com/FizzyPopStudios/lua-patches


--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Selangor, Malaysia