pansa2

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121.
by pansa2 1y ago
IIRC Brendan Eich has talked about this - if he’d adopted Lua in 1995 instead of creating JavaScript, it wouldn’t have been Lua 5.x but Lua 2.x. Lua has improved substantially from version to version because it’s been able to break compatib
122.
by pansa2 1y ago
> work has begun on Lua 5.5 A beta version is now available: https://www.lua.org/work/ The main change from 5.4 seems to be the (optional?) removal of global-by-default, instead requiring declarations for global v
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by pansa2 1y ago
>> I don't understand why people say it's an easy language > I find Lua simple The comment you've replied to is correct: "easy ≠ simple". Lua is indeed simple, but it chooses simplicity over ease-of-use
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by pansa2 1y ago
IIRC Mike Pall (LuaJIT’s “BDFL”, and also the only person who’s ever really worked on it) dislikes some features of newer Lua versions, particularly 5.2’s _ENV.
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by pansa2 1y ago
Lua 5.5 will change the way global variables work: AFAICT you’ll be able to opt out of global-by-default
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by pansa2 1y ago
The big difference between static typing in Python and Ruby is that Guido et al have embraced type hints, whereas Matz considers them to be (the Ruby equivalent of) “unpythonic”. Most of each language’s community follows their (ex-)BDFL’s l
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by pansa2 1y ago
> we must think of the creators of programming languages and their creations as the top of the field The people at the top of the type-system-design field aren’t working on Python.
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by pansa2 1y ago
> Why? Python’s 3 traditional weak spots, which almost all statically-typed languages do better: performance, parallelism and deployment.
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by pansa2 1y ago
I agree completely! To be clear, I don’t consider describing code as “Python 2-style” to be a bad thing. It’s how I describe my own Python code! Overall, I have found very few Python 3 features are worth adopting (one notable exception is f
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by pansa2 1y ago
> They don’t violate the spirit of the language. They are optional. That in itself violates the spirit of the language, IMO. “There should be one obvious way to do it”.
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by pansa2 1y ago
Yes. It also lacks the ease-of-deployment of a compiled language.
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by pansa2 1y ago
Fair enough, apart from Ruby they’re all pretty niche. OTOH I’m not arguing that most code should be dynamically-typed. Far from it. But I do think dynamic typing has its place and shouldn’t be rejected entirely. Also, I would have preferre
133.
by pansa2 1y ago
You’re probably right. RedMonk [0] shows JavaScript and TypeScript separately and has the former well above the latter. [0] https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...
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by pansa2 1y ago
As the article says, type hints represent a fundamental change in the way Python is written. Most developers seem to prefer this new approach (especially those who’d rather be writing Java, but are stuck using Python because of its librarie
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by pansa2 1y ago
> all the popular dynamic languages have slowly become statically typed I’ve heard this before, but it’s not really true. Yes, maybe the majority of JavaScript code is now statically-typed, via Typescript. Some percentage of Python cod
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by pansa2 1y ago
Yes. And people who preferred the language (and its culture) before the "fundamental change" of adding type hints are now less willing to use it.
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by pansa2 1y ago
IIRC Julia's is a particularly simple method-based JIT for a dynamically-typed language. I'm not sure exactly how it differs from most JavaScript JITs, but I believe it just compiles each method once for each set of function argum
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by pansa2 1y ago
> it is very common to encounter dynamically-typed scripting languages that are much more complex than some languages with excellent type systems. You're right, that statement was too general. Python is a dynamically-typed scripti
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by pansa2 1y ago
> Kind of surprising if no one picked it up LuaJIT’s code is very complex and esoteric, I don’t think anyone other than Mike Pall has done any significant work on it.
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by pansa2 1y ago
IIRC Mike Pall dislikes some features of newer versions, particularly 5.2’s _ENV.
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by pansa2 1y ago
Luau seems to be significantly more complex than Lua - I'm not sure it can still be called "small". Looking at the relative size of the implementations: Luau's is 120,000 lines of C++ [0], an order of magnitude larger th
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by pansa2 1y ago
How does Luau compare to Teal [0], which is described similarly as a "statically-typed dialect of Lua"? [0] https://teal-language.org/
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by pansa2 1y ago
> It'd've been RGB :) Yeah, sounds like one of those CRT monitors that has separate BNC connectors for each of RGBHV.
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by pansa2 1y ago
> python/ruby/etc never denied that the procedural world existed Interestingly, those two languages use very different mechanisms for top-level functions - although I’m not sure if there’s a significant difference in practice
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by pansa2 1y ago
AFAICT the main difference is that Hollow Knight focuses on (and gets most of its challenge from) combat, whereas Ori focuses on platforming. Hollow Knight has 47 boss encounters - OatBF doesn't have any (but I think the sequel does)
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by pansa2 1y ago
> you are supposed to willingly explore the game world, you know, the core of a Metroidvania This is why I bounced off Hollow Knight despite enjoying similar games like Metroid, Ori etc. The “shade” system actively discourages explorat
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by pansa2 1y ago
> I still have no idea what port 220h was It’s the address (in I/O space, separate from memory space) which the CPU can read/write to communicate with the sound card.
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by pansa2 1y ago
AFAICT Mojo has (or plans to have) Python-like syntax and easy interop with Python. I’m not sure it’s any more Python-like than that - the similarity to Python seems to be heavily overstated for marketing reasons.
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by pansa2 1y ago
Sounds to me like it's very incomplete: > maybe a year, 18 months from now [...] we’ll add classes
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by pansa2 1y ago
True, but the way they work is more like discs than ROMs: their data isn’t immediately available but needs to be loaded into RAM.

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