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by giann 3003 days ago
I’m talking about the cognitive load of the language. Learning JS is a real complex task whereas learning Lua is not. Learning JS as is is hard since its moving so fast. I think nobody can deny the confusion surrounding the language. Lua is stable is the sense that 5 years from now you will still know how to use it even if you don’t keep up with the latest updates.

Also if you have ever dealt with any babel/webpack craziness recently you know what I’m referring to :)

1 comments

So JavaScript _the language_ is "unstable" because you (for no discernable reason) switch to every bleeding edge JS framework that gets posted to HN?
I’m not talking about frameworks. I’m talking about ES5/6/2016/2017/7/8 ... which all add new concepts and complexity.
You know those new concepts and complexities are optional? And backwards compatible? None of my jQueries broke when generators came out. And that's not even very fast at all. And people have been complaining for the longest time that JS didn't have those features.
This really is not a good argument. You can still write php like in 98, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn modern php if you want to work ever.
But isn't modern PHP moving too fast though? They also break BC with a proper deprecation process. I don't know what you mean it's not a good argument, I've just been casually pointing out that your points are completely invalid. There's actually pretty good reasons to use lua over JS, you don't have to make up reasons.
I think I list a good amount of reasons to use Lua. The focus of the article is far from being fixated on JS being bad.