[rpastuszak]

> Roblox is immensely popular, has a wide install base and thousands of developers with code in Lua already.

100% agree till here:

> Why throw all of that away for an inferior language?

I'd say "not the right tool for the job, given their target audience".

Saying that JS is inferior to Lua (Lua's great IK) isn't much of a productive comment—if they built their audience with JS, they wouldn't be pivoting to Lua because it has achieved superiority in the eternal language wars.

[samatman]

It was a provocative comment, sure, but I wouldn't say unproductive: others asked why Lua is superior, and several people answered, myself included.

Heartily agree that the same basic argument would apply if Roblox had started with JS! Lua isn't so much better than JS that it would be worth scrapping collective centuries of labour over.

But given that it is the better language, in my not-so-humble opinion, why on Earth would they switch?

I think the only rational way to argue superiority of Javascript over Lua, is to point to aspects outside of the language itself: larger install base, more libraries, bigger, more vibrant community, better tooling, and so on.

But I prefer to call that the ecosystem, and can confidently say that Javascript, alas, has the superior ecosystem. A pity, because Lua is the superior language.