Re: TechRepublic article about languages to avoid in 2018

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 6:14 PM, Milind Gupta <milind.gupta@gmail.com> wrote:
> The most disliked are mentioned in the video but the ones to avoid are in
> the article.
>     Unfortunately Lua is in the list of languages to avoid.
>
> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-5-worst-programming-languages-to-learn-in-2018/

I think the article gets pretty hyperbolic about things, and it
definitely overgeneralizes.

It's probably true that you shouldn't set out to learn Lua in 2018 for
the purposes of landing a new job. That's a reasonable enough claim.

But to say that you should "avoid [it] at all costs" is inflammatory
and ridiculous. Unlike Objective-C, which has been relegated to a
second-class citizen even by its leading proponent, Lua still fits its
role very well and there's no technical reason not to use it. And
unlike Erlang and Dart, which were things with big hype and big
promise that ended up not getting traction, Lua is well-established
and certainly not going away -- as long as there are World of Warcraft
mods, Lua will remain. And unlike CoffeeScript, Lua hasn't been
superseded by advances in the problem it was trying to solve in the
first place.

The only problem Lua has is that it's stopped GROWING proportional to
the size of the overall market, not that it's stopped being RELEVANT.
There are more Lua developers than there are Lua jobs. But that's not
a reason to avoid Lua at all costs.

It's inflammatory language just to make the article more exciting to
get more views and therefore more ad revenue.

Save yourself a click, fair reader, and don't bother reading the article.

/s/ Adam