I tend to agree with you, but here is the reasoning behind how Lua works: - local by default weakens what you can do with the scope; - we want something by de

I tend to agree with you, but here is the reasoning behind how Lua works: - local by default weakens what you can do with the scope; - we want something by default because the language is used for things like configuration files. The 2nd point means this must be valid: param_1 = "foo" param_2 = "bar" I would personally be happy to sacrifice that feature and add an explicit "global" keyword but not everybody agrees, and it would break a lot of code. What we do instead is use two kinds of tools: static global detectors and strictures (like in Perl). Similar tools are integrated in IDEs as well. With these tools, I have never had an issue with scoping in code I have written. But it takes a little time to get used to it.