Tamale: An Erlang-Style Pattern-Matching Library for Lua

github.com

65 points·networked··7 comments

I worry a bit when I see something like this that people will think Erlang is even clunkier than it actually is.

Erlang pattern matching is sufficiently integral to the language that it effectively wouldn't exist without the feature. It's so much more powerful than "here's a list of data shapes, pick one."

(This concern holds true for a lot of other attempts to take pieces of Erlang and incorporate them into other environments too. Erlang's features are highly complementary to each other, the synergy is the language.)

Yup, you take away pattern matching and you can't loop at all in Erlang.

Things like this are why I like Lua so much.

It can be easily extended into just about any type of programming paradigm to best fit your problem domain.

I'm just starting to get into Lua (thanks HammerSpoon) and I feel like it's a 1.0 or grown up javascript.

You have a syntax that isn't broken and the projects tend to be more interesting (like this one) rather than: I re-implemented a Unix tool that's been around since the 60's and mine is a million times slower!

Just for fun, I didn't realize that the singular form of "tamales" was "tamal" until I moved to Mexico.

In Texas, we'd say "I'll have another tamale".

I don't actually like them, but it still bothers me when I see a cannolo referred to as cannoli. Thanks for educating me on tamales.

Here's a (totally off-topic) question: is it "a panini" or "a panino"? It's one sandwich, but two pieces of bread.

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