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The only thing I dislike about Lua is the 1-indexing. I know they had reasons for it but it always caused issues.
I'm torn on this. Initially I agreed, just because so many other languages do it that way. But if you ignore that and clean slate it, IMO, 1 based makes more sense. I feel like 0 based mainly gained foothold because of C's bastardization of arrays vs pointers and associated tricks. But most other languages don't even support that. You can only see :len(x)-1 so many times before you realize how ridiculous it is.
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Not "never exploit"; Reason and BuckleScript are examples of different "language skins" for OCaml. The problem with "skins" is that they create variety where people strive for uniformity to lower the cognitive load. OTOH transparent switching between skins (about as easy as changing the tab sizes) would alleviate that.
> transparent switching between skins (about as easy as changing the tab sizes) One of my pet "not today but some day" project ideas. In my case, I wanted to give Python/Gdscript syntax to any & all the curly languages (a potential boon to all users of non-Anglo keyboard layouts), one by one, via VSCode extension that implements a virtual filesystem over the real one which translates back & forth the syntaxes during…
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I don't write modern C for daily use, so I can't really say. But I've been re-learning and writing C99 more these days, not professionally but personal use - and I appreciate the smallness of the language. Might even say C peaked at C99. I mean, I'd be crazy to say that C-like languages after C99, like Java, PHP, etc., are all misguided for how unnecessarily big and complex they are. It might be that I'm becoming mor…
C11 adds a couple of nice things like static asserts which I use sometimes to document assumptions I make. They did add some optional sections like bounds checking that seem to have flopped, partly for being optional, partly for being half-baked. Having optional sections in general seems like a bad idea.
Fabrice Bellard is widely considered one of the most productive and versatile programmers alive: - FFmpeg: https://bellard.org - QEMU: https://bellard.org/qemu/ - JSLinux: https://bellard.org/jslinux/ - TCC: https://bellard.org/tcc/ - QuickJS: https://bellard.org/quickjs/ Legendary.
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Yeah QuickJS is great. I bet MQJS will also be very popular. Quite impressive that bro is going to have two JS engines to brag about in addition to a lot of other very useful things!
> Quite impressive... Yes, quite! Monsieur Bellard is a legend of computer programming. It would be hard to think of another programmer whose body of public work is more impressive than FB. Unfortunate that he doesn't seem to write publicly about how he thinks about software. I've never seen him as a guest on any podcast either. I have long wondered who the "Charlie Gordon" who seems to collaborate with him on everyt…
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Not to mention the 1-based indexing sin. JavaScript has a lot of WTFs but they got that right at least.
There's nothing wrong with 1-based indexing. The only reason it seems wrong to you is because you're familiar with 0-based, not because it's inherently worse.
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> Ruby, which appeared just 2 years later, departs a lot more, arguably without good reasons either? I doubt we ever would have heard about Ruby without it's syntax decisions. From my understanding it's entire raison d'être was readability.
It's essentially Perl for people who don't like punctuation marks.
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IDK about C11; but C99 doesn't change a lot compared to ANSI C. You can read The C Programming Language 2nd edition and pick up C99 in a week. It adds boleans, some float/complex math ops, an optional floating point definition and a few more goodies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C99 C++ by comparison it's a behemoth. If C++ died and, for instance, the FLTK guys rebased their libraries into C (and Boost for instance)…
C++ is a katamari ball of programming trends and half baked ideas. I get why google built golang, as they were already pretty strict about what parts of the c++ sediments you were allowed to use.
Also, the Limbo language it's basically pre-Go.