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Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

> it feels like it departs from what people know without good reasons.

Lua was first released in 1993. I think that it's pretty conventional for the time, though yeah it did not follow Algol syntax but Pascal's and Ada's (which were more popular in Brazil at the time than C, which is why that is the case)!

Ruby, which appeared just 2 years later, departs a lot more, arguably without good reasons either? Perl, which is 5 years older and was very popular at the time, is much more "different" than Lua from what we now consider mainstream.

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We had a lot problems embedding Ruby in a multithreaded C program as the garbage collector tries to scan memory between the threads (more details here: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit/-/commit/7364cbaae809b5ffb6... )

Perl, Python, OCaml, Lua and Rust were all fine (Rust wasn't around in 2010 of course).

I'm reving _why's syck right now. Turns out my fork from 2013 was still the most advanced. It doesn't implement the latest YAML specs, and all of it's new insecurities, which is a good thing. And it's much, much faster than the sax-like libyaml.

But since syck uses the ruby hashtable internally, I got stuck in the gem for a while. It fell out of their stdlib, and is not really maintained neither. PHP had the latest updates for it. And perl (me) extended it to be more recursion safe, and added more policies (what to do on duplicate keys: skip or overwrite).

So the ruby bindings are troublesome because of its GC, which with threading requires now7 a global vm instance. And using the ruby alloc/free pairs.

PHP, perl, python, Lua, IO, cocoa, all no problem. Just ruby, because of its too tight coupling. Looks I have to decouple it finally from ruby.

> Ruby, which appeared just 2 years later, departs a lot more, arguably without good reasons either?

I doubt we ever would have heard about Ruby without it's syntax decisions. From my understanding it's entire raison d'être was readability.

It's essentially Perl for people who don't like punctuation marks.

More like if Smalltalk and Perl had a prettier baby.

    def ruby(is)
      it = is 
      a = "bad"
      example()
      begin
        it["had"] = pascal(:like)
      rescue
        flow
      end
    end

Pascal and Ada are Algol syntaxed relative to most languages.

> yeah it did not follow Algol syntax but Pascal's and Ada's

Now quite sure what you mean by that; all of Lua, Pascal, and Ada follow Algol's syntax much more closely than C does.

I don't think you understand his point. Ruby has a different syntax because it presents different/more language features than a very basic C-like language; it's inspired by Lisp/SmallTalk, after all. Lua doesn't but still decided to change its looks a lot, according to him.

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