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I think Lua was always seen as a bit obscure, and not enough people invested in the language to write useful utilities. It has a solid C foreign function interf

I think Lua was always seen as a bit obscure, and not enough people invested in the language to write useful utilities. It has a solid C foreign function interface, and the compiler is quite fast, which leaves me puzzled about why it never gained traction. I think it's an embedded scripting language in the majority of use cases (e.g. NeoVim, LuaLaTeX, scripting in some game engines). The story of Ruby is altogether different: they made the fatal mistake of not defining a C foreign function interface in the standard, otherwise I imagine we'd be seeing numerical computation and ML libraries with a Ruby interface today. Still, Ruby lives on in Metasploit, and in Sorbet and Crystal.

sethrin 4y ago
> The story of Ruby is altogether different: they made the fatal mistake of not defining a C foreign function interface in the standard, otherwise I imagine we'd be seeing numerical computation and ML libraries with a Ruby interface today. This to me is extremely plausible, and sad.
yamtaddle 4y ago
> I think Lua was always seen as a bit obscure, and not enough people invested in the language to write useful utilities. It has a solid C foreign function interface, and the compiler is quite fast, which leaves me puzzled about why it never gained traction. I think it's an embedded scripting language in the majority of use cases (e.g. NeoVim, LuaLaTeX, scripting in some game engines). - Lua's standard library is so weak that it makes most other batteries-not-included languages look like they have large, robust, and helpful standard libraries. - It's got a bit of the quirkiness and gotcha-ability of JavaScript but without its being a language that's impossible to avoid due to capture of a mega-popular platform, which is what propelled JavaScript to ubiquity despite its being kinda shit and unpleasant to work with. - Tooling's not as good as many other languages. (FWIW sometimes I write Lua regardless, because it's the right tool for the job)

sethrin 4y ago

> The story of Ruby is altogether different: they made the fatal mistake of not defining a C foreign function interface in the standard, otherwise I imagine we'd be seeing numerical computation and ML libraries with a Ruby interface today. This to me is extremely plausible, and sad.

yamtaddle 4y ago

> I think Lua was always seen as a bit obscure, and not enough people invested in the language to write useful utilities. It has a solid C foreign function interface, and the compiler is quite fast, which leaves me puzzled about why it never gained traction. I think it's an embedded scripting language in the majority of use cases (e.g. NeoVim, LuaLaTeX, scripting in some game engines). - Lua's standard library is so weak that it makes most other batteries-not-included languages look like they have large, robust, and helpful standard libraries. - It's got a bit of the quirkiness and gotcha-ability of JavaScript but without its being a language that's impossible to avoid due to capture of a mega-popular platform, which is what propelled JavaScript to ubiquity despite its being kinda shit and unpleasant to work with. - Tooling's not as good as many other languages. (FWIW sometimes I write Lua regardless, because it's the right tool for the job)