Re: Thought experiment: what would you remove from Lua

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 2:06 PM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
> Op Do., 20 Sep. 2018 om 20:44 het Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> geskryf:
>
>> Likewise, if you have a tool you're proficient with that's close
>> enough, while you're unfamiliar with the tool that would on the
>> surface appear to be superior, then that other tool is NOT the right
>> tool for the job.
>
> Well, by that definition, most of the time Lua is the right tool for
> the job. I did Python for about four years and never felt
> "proficient"; I considered myself proficient (albeit optimistically)
> after about 18 months of Lua and have not looked back.
>
> If I may for a moment regress to the OP's subject, my answer after 89
> messages, is: nothing.

Lua has the beautiful advantage of being unopinionated. It has exactly
the feature set necessary to implement a broad variety of meaningful
programming paradigms without overprivileging any one of them. It can
do OOP (prototypes), it can do FP (tail call optimization and
lambdas), it can do declarative (original design motivation!), or of
course it's happy to do good ol' procedural/imperative. It can do
synchronous or asynchronous. With a bit of elbow grease it can
integrate with just about anything.

It's not the perfect tool for every job -- no tool is -- but as long
as you don't need C levels of performance, you've got the deployment
side of things solved, and you've got bindings for any libraries you
want to use, Lua is a great general-purpose workhorse. And if you need
to embed a scripting language in a host application, Lua jumps from
"great" to "best in class".

So yes, I too hold the opinion that the Lua core can't afford to lose
anything it has built into it right now. It's as lean as it can get
without sacrificing its versatility.

/s/ Adam