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Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

>it can't be used on iOS

LuaJIT interpreter which is _faster_ can be used on iOS. So you would use an immature language everywhere because you can't use the fastest implementation on one platform (iOS), when infact, the LuaJIT interpreter is the fastest interpreter of any dynamic language on all platforms.

Wonkiness is not a substantive claim. How do class systems break because of it?

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Magic methods are wonky. Things that get called, although they don't exist, have to traverse an arbitrary system to determine an implementation (may or may not exist). Now add that you can determine that system of traversal, at runtime. Now add arbitrary constraints like 42 local vars per scope, singular inefficient table, no switch (but currying is ok, certainly one of these is more confusing than the other in every CS class) ultimately forcing some wonkiness in every project. It's truly a strange confluence of features leading to an even dumber javascript. I use Lua a lot.

Different strokes I guess.

I consider Lua's type system almost mathematical in its elegance. For my taste, Lua is the penultimate dynamic language, held back only by the unforgivable Wirth-style indexing from 1.

The one place where I simply must correct you is in calling tables inefficient. LuaJIT's implementation, as interpreted, is demonstrably among the fastest general-purpose container classes in widespread use.

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