[DonHopkins]

Don't be so sure you won't miss work if you haven't yet tried Factorio! ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362179

WoW was what convinced me how practical and powerful Lua really was, too. And that there were people out there that knew how to program it really well.

The WoW "Auctioneer" mod in particular was quite advanced and elegantly written. It would analyze the prices of items in the auction house over time, and help you price and sell your own items competitively. Not just lots of fancy user interface, but some respectable data wrangling and number crunching too.

One important thing about Lua is how cleanly and efficiently it integrates with C code. TCL/Tk also has this virtue, but TCL was a terribly designed (but brilliantly implemented) programming language. While both Lua's design and implementation are quite excellent. It also has a great community, plus RMS never declared a holy war on it, either!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14944103

https://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0000.html

[eadmund]

> TCL was a terribly designed (but brilliantly implemented) programming language.

What do you dislike about Tcl? I always kinda liked it.

> While both Lua's design and implementation are quite excellent.

The implementation is pretty good, but 1-based arrays are pretty evil. I don't know if I like the way arrays & tables are conflated either: part of me thinks it's clever, and part thinks that it's too clever by half.

It's also pretty verbose.

Something I like about both Tcl & Lisp is that they have a good built-in messaging format (Tcl object notation in the former, and S-expressions in the latter). Lua doesn't really have something similar, which is IMHO unfortunate.