The Scripting Language article appeared right after a friend sent me an email about Lua. About a year ago I had some script I was playing with that was in Lua and I thought it looked like a pretty interesting language. But, the thought quickly passed as I have, well, enough other things to do.
We'll, my friend had the following points:
- What a piece of crap JavaScript is
- How big Python is
- How cool it would be if browsers had Lua, not JavaScript in them
On the first point, let's just say that JavaScript and design fit together about as well as Perl and design. (Ok, that should have made me enough enemies.)
While Python is my first choice for a "big" language (awk is my first choice if the task makes sense within the confines of awk), it is a big language. Execution size is one issue but, for someone new to programming, there is a lot to learn to write good Python.
Now, my friend suggested that if Lua was in a browser then you could implement most anything (including JavaScript) in Lua. Ok, I haven't given this a lot of thought and I am far from an expert on Lua (or JavaScript—it's right up there with Perl on my "languages to avoid" list) but maybe he is right. Maybe we just need to embed Lua is some browser, write a JavaScript interpreter in it for the hard-core, a Lua tutorial and then just wait for Lua to take over the world.
