Lua is the SQLite of program languages, absolutely blast
nice LoL
The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]
21–30 of 175 posts
Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]
#22Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]
#23It is interesting that so many of the largest languages were developed in a couple year time frame in the early-mid 90s. Python, Javascript, Java, Lua, R. All of these were developed 91-95 and make a bulk of development today.
I think that's an illusion.
The language of R is S, which originated at Bell Labs in 01976. Python began development in 01989, although Guido didn't release it until 01991. And the top 20 on https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ are Python, C (01972?), C++ (01982?), Java, C# (01999? though arguably it's just a dialect of Java), JS, Visual Basic (first released 01991, within your window), Golang (02007), Delphi (under this name in 01995 but a dialect of Object Pascal from 01986, in turn a dialect of Pascal, from 01970), SQL (01973), Fortran (01957), Perl (01987), R, PHP (01995, within your window!), assembly (01947), Rust (02006), MATLAB/Octave (01984), Scratch (! 02003), Ada (01978?), and Kotlin (02011).
By decade, that's one language from the 40s, one language from the 50s, no languages from the 60s, 5 languages from the 70s, 5 languages from the 80s, 4 languages from the 90s, 3 languages from 0200x, one language from the 02010s, and no languages from the 02020s.
Lua is #33 on TIOBE's list, but given its prevalence in Roblox (as Luau), WoW, and other games, I suspect it should be much higher.
For some reason, CUDA (a dialect of C++) and shader languages like GLSL don't show up in the list at all.
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I think most of what's going on here is that it takes a new language a long time to get good, and it takes a new good language a long time to get popular. Perl, Python, Java, PHP, and JS became popular because of the Web; https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/server-programming explains why Perl, Python, and PHP did, and of course Java and JS became popular because they were the only languages you could make interactive web pages in:
> You would think that picking a Web site development language would be trivial. Obviously the best languages are safe and incorporate powerful object systems. So let's do everything in Common Lisp or Java. Common Lisp can run interpeted as well as compiled, which makes it a more efficient language for developers. So Common Lisp should be the obvious winner of the Web server language wars. Yet nobody uses Common Lisp for server-side scripting. Is that because Java-the-hype-king has crushed it? No. In fact, to a first approximation, nobody uses Java for server-side scripting. Almost everyone is using simple interpreted languages such as Visual Basic, PHP, Perl, or Tcl.
> How could a lame string-oriented scripting language possibly compete in power with systems programming languages? Well, guess what? The only data type that you can write to a Web browser is a string. And all the information from the relational database management system on which you are relying comes back to to the Web server program as strings. So maybe it doesn't matter whether your scripting language has an enfeebled type system.
Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]
#24Lua is the SQLite of program languages, absolutely blast
While I enjoy Lua, clean, elegant, and entirely too reasonable, Tcl is undoubtedly the SQLite of programming languages. https://www.tcl-lang.org/community/tcl2017/assets/talk93/Pap... It's because Tcl, like SQLite, operates on a peculiar metaphysical principle: everything is a string until proven otherwise, and even then, it's probably still a string. Also, D. Richard Happ, who we owe thanks for SQLite, was and perha…
*Hipp
Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]
#25Wish there is newer LuaJIT to leverage the new Lua features, but then maybe those new features are not really that critical.
LuaJIT is in somewhat active development, with 40 commits so far this year, although these are mostly bug fixes (some for bugs introduced by LLVM). The main new feature, if you can call it that, is "suport for Apple hardened runtime."
Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]
#26It is interesting that so many of the largest languages were developed in a couple year time frame in the early-mid 90s. Python, Javascript, Java, Lua, R. All of these were developed 91-95 and make a bulk of development today.
Languages developed in that time matured just as good binary package managers started popping up, is my pet theory. Before that, getting a development environment for a new language was serious work, and people did things like stick to Perl since it happened to be installed already.
Not true.
I was programming in the 90s when these languages emerged. Developments environments were emacs, vi, Brief, Borland IDE, etc. There were a few other IDEs available, but about $200 per seat.
All the scripting languages mentioned didn't come as default in Unix or Windows. You had to download from their own websites.
It was mostly Visual Basic, C, COBOL that were popular.
Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]
#27My only context in using Lua is my neovim configuration, does any know of any good books or tutorials that make something more advance using only lua? Anything of note to consider/read/watch?
Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I enjoy Lua, clean, elegant, and entirely too reasonable, Tcl is undoubtedly the SQLite of programming languages. https://www.tcl-lang.org/community/tcl2017/assets/talk93/Pap... It's because Tcl, like SQLite, operates on a peculiar metaphysical principle: everything is a string until proven otherwise, and even then, it's probably still a string. Also, D. Richard Happ, who we owe thanks for SQLite, was and perha…
Lua is one of the easiest configuration file formats I've had the pleasure of working with. Readable. Has comments. Variables. Conditionals. Everyone (including me): "oh no, no, you don't want a full Turing complete language in your configuration file format" Also Everyone: generating their configuration files with every bespoke templating language dreamed of by gods and men, with other Turing complete languages.
It's a security issue. Configs are user interfaces. Devs generating configs is irrelevant.
Re: The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]
#29That's it - I'm building my next startup in Lua!