Epic Lua Rant

[zcaudate]

Hanno Behrens, IT Consultant living in Germany, 200+ languages, don't care
Updated 1 year ago · Author has 1.1K answers and 4.6M answer views

Why is the Lua scripting language so hated?
Who says that?

That’s stupid. It is a good tool. And it now pops up in every second application as an embedded language (VIM, NeoVIM, LuaLaTeX, Nmap, Wireshark, Snort and many more), it drives the most successful game ever (Minecraft, Minetest, Love2D/Löve with a gazillion games, CryEngine,…) it is an easy language with 22 keywords, it beats Python and Ruby and the other stuff to pulp when it comes to performance and memory consumption, has no relevant startup time and is about factor 1.3 slower than C, sometimes even less than this, sometimes a bit more, but the next competition in speed is the ugly resource-hog Java which hangs factor 3–5 behind C and is compiled and JavaScript, which is speedwise comparable (mostly) but not a bit as versatile as well as it is full of design flaws.

List of applications using Lua - Wikipedia

And you can’t count Typescript as a solution, because that’s already a compiling language, even if it has JS output. And will always be a bit slower than pure JS, because abstraction costs. Always.

People who take LuaJIT as their HLL solution take it because of the numbers.

If you are looking for fanboys, you go to the Python and Ruby community, who are effectively ignoring numbers, just because they can play with their favorite toy, can talk their favorite bullshit about how wonderful their language is, while you know, if you worked in Python that it’s a torture, the always breaking library base, the incompatibility, the trench war between Python 2 fanboys and Python 3 fanboys, the library base that is divided, the poor state of everything, they do actually implement number crunch in that language and they are even proud of that and dispute how to do really hard algorithms in that slowpoke.

That’s not engineering. That’s playing around.

And they are wasting our CPU and our energy in computing centers with that, are jamming the computing pipelines with their hobbyist crap and they enjoy to be manhandled by their language like that guy in Monthy Python who was begging for being tortured, they make invisible characters to meaning parts of the syntax, a tab at the false place, a space where it doesn’t belong and your automatic car crashes through the mall and mangeling the kindergarden, making a wheely and roaring off.

That’s just insane.

And it will cost lives and I think whoever came up with the stupid idea to make invisible characters meaningful in a language should burn in the 8th level of Dantes Inferno until Oracle lowers the prices for their oversold crap and burn forever on a overclocked Prescott Pentium core.

Man. Fanboys. I have been reading “Fanboys” here.

If I want to do real computing, I do it in C or if I do it in OpenCL, it is okay to fill the pipeline with LuaJIT. But if you think that you can throw a boulder on a racetrack and tell that the area filled with that Python boulder would not influence the outcome of that race, you are dead wrong.

It will just trash everything and Python has to be forcefully removed from the professional computing as quick as it is possible and replaced with anything. Really with anything professional.

I promote C and LuaJIT, but there are other languages. Even JavaScript I accept, at least those guys know the value of efficiency even if they do most things wrong. There are so many beautiful languages.

Why chose the pendant to syphilis when it comes to computer languages?

Python, that’s not a language, that’s a toy for masochists, that’s the fiddlediddle for the pampered who already tried everything, and love to be punished for every false stroke they do and being lectured and patronized by their language and who by a good hardware just to burn the value and the electricity for that in a factor of 29/30 into heat and lost time of life.

Python is not as bad as Java, I give that language that. But it’s not much better either.

And why do people chose Python? Because it is their first language. It is their only language, why do people do stupid things? Why do they stay with a wife that is permanently cheating on them? Why do they behave irrational, why do they love to be punished by women in leather? Why? I have no idea.

But I think that’s the human condition. We have to live with that. But please. Please not in a professional environment.

Python is not professional.

LuaJIT is.

And that’s the difference. But nobody knows LuaJIT but the Asians and the Chinese, where they fire their whole IT infrastructure and their webservers like Alibaba in a single rack with LuaJIT where US and Europeans need a whole computing center just to send little messages of 144 characters, n’est-ce pas Twitter?

But something like LuaJIT isn’t taught by teachers in school. They fear to learn something new and stay at the old crap, it was always like this. So everybody learns Python and Java and gets sterilized with that chlorine until there is no fun left for computing by that. Like the Marathon man got his front tooth drilled, that’s Python or Java.

You have to have some cultist affiliation to that, you have to feel religious about these “languages” to follow them, because that’s as crazy as some religions what they ask you as a programmer to do.

To throw away the state machine. Ban the goto from a language in a way that even Dijkstra is screaming in pain: “I didn’t wanted that!” That’s literally what he said about that. That he distances himself from that interpretation of him.

Because he’s not an ignorant idiot to ban something like a jump from a language, while every second algorithm is in its core only efficiently implementable with a state machine and jumps.

We are living in a Lysenkoism time in my beloved field of computer science. Where ideology has taken preference over outcome and numbers, where the “Pythonic way” the “socialist way to plant seeds”, where ideology has taken over the field of rationality and knowledge.

And here some people dare to say LuaJIT would be chosen because of “fanboys”. Au contraire, mon ami, au contraire. We take that, because it is delivering numbers. It leaves it on us how to best implement the algorithms, it doesn’t dictate us the “right” way, the “politically correct” way, the way of dogma and ideology.

And they will kill people with that. A lot of people. You won’t see it like in the case of Lysenko who directly is responsible for at least 20 million deaths in Russia alone and uncounted deaths under Maos Culture Revolution in China, who did the same. And died in the high tens of millions.

We are burning our future with that crap.

And you ask, why not more people are using LuaJIT?

Because we are a minority. Those who stick to numbers, stick to outcome and rationality, those who want to solve problems. It is decadence.

It is not anymore about solving problems. It is about solving it with the right attitude, the “Pythonic way” or “pure functional” or “clean OOP” or what the crap.

Decadence and downfall. That’s the reason.

And yes. I am mildly opposed to that crap. And I won’t put the shame into flowery words to cover the stink that is in the air. I am ashamed for my field.

Truly ashamed. We of all scientists. We. Computer Science. We. Priests of rationality and clean thinking, of passion and we straight problem solvers.

We fall for that idiotic crap. I could really cry.

But yes. That’s the reason. That’s truly the reason.

But in our field the wrong stuff dies. Because if anyone is using this, he will blast out the slowpokes and the inefficient out of the water like the submarine Red October did when it fled from this world of idiocy to break free of it.

And that’s what’s happening in China now. They are blowing us out of the water. And the old crap here will die. And we deserve it, for we have become fat, stupid and arrogant. We have become pius and we are on a race of cleanness, not only politically there is a downward spiral of virtue signalling, it is everywhere, it is deeply rotten in the core of our Zeitgeist and it has rotten through and through to even the inner core of our society, into science, even and especially computer science.

That’s why this is happening. And the only thing we can do is building up a competition and starve them out by efficiency and competition. And we have to be outspoken about this. Don’t let them get away with that crap.