[_ugfj]

It's interesting to see Haskell vibes mentioned.

Where's the "well yes but actually no" meme when one needs it.

It's not Haskell, it's Scheme.

https://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf

> Semantically, Lua has many similarities with Scheme, even though these similarities are not immediately clear be- cause the two languages are syntactically very different. The influence of Scheme on Lua has gradually increased during Lua’s evolution: initially, Scheme was just a language in the background, but later it became increasingly important as a source of inspiration, especially with the introduction of anonymous functions and full lexical scoping

Of course, Haskell was also Scheme influenced although it's an ML descendant.

Speaking of this, I wonder what would've happened if they embedded Lua into Netscape instead of writing JavaScript...

[suby]

I think if Lua were adopted as the web language, it would have lost its spirit / design philosophy of simplicity. I think the web would have exerted an evolutionary pressure on whatever language was the chosen as the exclusive way of writing code. Everyone forced to use a single language as the only option plus too many people clamoring for their own pet language feature to be added plus design by committee will probably always lead to a mess.

[at_a_remove]

I have been having thoughts, wild and incoherent, about the evolution of a given programming language. What does it take to survive and thrive? I might describe my programming career as being kind of a refugee: on the web, I moved from plain .asp to Perl, fled Perl for Python ...

At the start, a language needs the ability to evolve. I recall reading a book on Python before I adopted it, a book which was so off-putting that I ended up delaying my attempts to use Python, and it went on about Python's philosophy when it came to division. I knew that, at some point, Python would have to change away from integer division by default. And it eventually did. It was a mistake because it was non-obvious, and the language changed to fix it. Good.

Now, though, all kinds of things have crept into Python which are decidedly non-Pythonic: the walrus operator, which looks like something that escaped from a Perl dungeon; the docopt module, which has a weird trap of it being a module you must know about, but only if someone has decided to use it; the utter shambles which is the whole environment and library packaging "let entirely too many ways to do it exist;" or the community's preference for Requests while it somehow has yet to be co-opted into the standard library. I am sure I have gored someone's ox here.

Perhaps a language needs a certain window before it is finally frozen in place. Or a more stringent, forceful mandate than the Zen of Python, which I think has been Not Enough. In a way, I am reminded of the Agile Manifesto, which was well-intentioned but had no enforcement, no orthodoxy; it lacked teeth to nip at the heels of those who fail, who go astray. Originally, I had considered that the Network Effect as a way to freeze things, but it seems to only work on protocols and less so on languages.

[nmz]

well, lua existed back then, but that lua is not lua5, even lua4 looks incredibly different especially when it comes to tables.

[chx]

Yeah that would've been lua2.1 described here: https://www.lua.org/spe.html