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Comment by Kaveren | Hacker News Reader

I think there's more value to be had in building better learning resources around programming languages than continually trying to simplify them at the expense of power.

Besides that, if someone is already looking for a simple scripting language, Lua already exists. I personally prefer its syntax as well.

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A person might make a language so they can learn to make a language. How could Lua exist if a person had no idea the tradeoffs in implementing various languages? You do not know the person's reasons.

You're absolutely correct, and making your own programming language implementations to generally improve as a programmer, for fun, or to get better at implementing programming languages is great. It can become a daunting task very quickly.

I was basing the person's reasoning after the original poster's reply:

> There are so many programming languages - but imho not a real easy one for beginners.

Lua really is a nice little language. I do wish it had 0-based arrays like everything else in common use though.

Apparently it was an evolution of Sol, which wasn't designed for programmers.

You'd think that everyone in computer science would have read https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF by now, though. Makes a fairly airtight case for zero-based indices.

I've noticed that in functional languages, the presence of enumeration operators makes indexing in any case almost entirely unnecessary. Perhaps the original problem was just a "design smell" all along.

Lua might have little features and have a small footprint, but it's not simple to understand

That's only half-true. Understanding all of Lua is hard, specially if you want to get into optimizing your code, but for simple tasks it's an incredibly easy to learn language. That being said, it really depends on the resources you're using to learn; Tutorials meant for programmers that bombard you with slang and exotic concepts will confuse newcomers.

Lua was made specially for non programmers. I think it is really intuitive and easy. I agree with the comment that perhaps understanding optmisation details is hard. But that's hard in every language.

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