Re:Lua, a Misunderstood Language
by josephg on Friday January 15, 2021 @08:26PM
(#25798993)
confabulate(foo.bar.baz[foo.bar.baz.length]);
The problem I have is that at a glance this looks correct. Even after decades of programming, I would scroll right past this line in JS without noticing the off-by-1 error here. The only saving grace is that this error will occur consistently.
But yes, I'd take Rust's xs.last() in a heartbeat. Especially because you can assign through it with last_mut().
That said, I agree with others in this thread. People fixate on the 1 based indexing of lua but you get used to it pretty quickly once you spend time with the language. Lua's real problem is its sparse standard library and its weak package ecosystem. If history had run its course slightly differently, I could easily see lua ending up inside web browsers instead of javascript. And becoming much more popular as a result. Lua and javascript are remarkably similar languages semantically.
But yes, I'd take Rust's xs.last() in a heartbeat. Especially because you can assign through it with last_mut().
That said, I agree with others in this thread. People fixate on the 1 based indexing of lua but you get used to it pretty quickly once you spend time with the language. Lua's real problem is its sparse standard library and its weak package ecosystem. If history had run its course slightly differently, I could easily see lua ending up inside web browsers instead of javascript. And becoming much more popular as a result. Lua and javascript are remarkably similar languages semantically.