What do I think about Lua after shipping a project with 60k lines of code?

> Much like C++ then — the machine code to which it translates lacks types!

Ehh, not exactly. Most C++ compilers won't output machine code for inputs they don't understand. Though of course, you could simply translate some C++ code yourself into machine code and then say C++ is just like TypeScript in that way. "If you turn C++ into machine code, the machine code lacks types!" "If you turn TypeScript into JavaScript, the JavaScript lacks types!" The main difference is the C++ compiler won't generate machine code for you if the code you provided it doesn't compile, but the TypeScript compiler essentially treats types as a lint (unless extended by compiler plugins such as `typescript-is`, which I greatly enjoyed back in the day).

Also, CHERI begs to differ. And even other than that, machine code isn't dynamically typed because it's not typed at all. Usually, everything is data (usually even the machine code itself, except on Harvard architectures), aside from any architecture-specific memory protections (and other protections), if applicable. I could probably go on about this for days.

> A TS compiler will reject an ill-typed program. You of course can just strip the type syntax and get a valid (though buggy) JavaScript code.

Can't Deno execute TypeScript directly? Last I checked, it didn't do typechecking itself because [the size and complexity of tsc].

For what that's worth, cling also exists, so try tricking that into executing compiler errors. I don't think it would.

Since when is LoC some kind of measurement?

> it will not crumble under its own weight

It is possible to make it not crumble under its own weight, right? I had my share of Lua nightmare with more than 100K lines of code back when I was a gamedev [1], and it seems that there are some requirements in order to remain sane with the growth. Thankfully there are now multiple working type checkers for Lua, unlike when I had to built my own.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18351788 is my canonical answer, but I have written many other comments about Lua which should be easy to search.

I played the demo of Craftomation 101 a while back. It was good! Had a good balance of watching emergent behavior and feeling the need to micro-manage/accelerate the process.

Graphical-only instructions were maddening, though! Especially organizing ideas by dragging them around in 2d space. I would have loved the ability to drop into written code.

To extend on this: There was always this implied impression that the original developers were hot because they got stuff up and running really quickly and that all the newer developers were lukewarm because they weren't getting stuff happening quickly at all, all as a result of the original language choice!