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Comment by saosebastiao | Hacker News Reader

I'm sitting here wishing lua was the de facto web language. Javascript makes me sad.

I guess if we could replace it with Lua we would still be sad. How do you think Lua makes for a better language for web?

Compare

https://www.google.com/search?q=javascript+wtf

vs.

https://www.google.com/search?q=lua+wtf

If that was the measure, maybe we could use a language nobody knows because it will pass this test with flying colors :)

I should have been more clear. I'm not saying to compare the number of results, but, rather, the things that people complain about with each language.

I've been teaching myself Lua recently and I've found it to be a nice, consistent, small language. Javascript is a fun language, but has some bad decisions built in: http://oreilly.com/javascript/excerpts/javascript-good-parts... and it can be really confusing at times: http://wtfjs.com/

Not implying that one language is better than the other, but how does Lua help solve problems that web developers face? I say this because I have been working on a "killer" web app (JS intensive) for the past few months and it has been a real pain but I dont see how Lua could have helped either.

Consistency, simplicity, and a pretty sparse range of WTFs. No language is magic...Lua is just more pleasant to work with.

I've used both, and prefer JavaScript. I do agree both have their issues though, you need to learn to avoid the dangerous stuff.

A lot of people find coroutines easier to work with than callbacks, so there's room for a Lua alternative to Node.js.

The way things are going, it looks like that alternative will also take advantage of Lua's embeddability to allow interop between web apps and web servers in a way that hasn't been widely practiced before.

> there's room for a Lua alternative to Node.js

Do you know Luvit? http://luvit.io/

I've heard of it, but I'm unclear on the benefit. Can't you do async I/O in Lua already? What's the value of adopting the Node.js model, which is mostly about adding I/O to V8 and using callback functions for async, in Lua? (I hope that doesn't sound trollish – I'm ignorant and would like to understand, and the Luvit project page doesn't help.)

y u no normalize ?

?q=javascript+wtf / ?q=javascript = 6.8M / 3.04G = 0.002233

?q=lua+wtf / ?q=lua = 844k / 109M = 0.008110

Well, you can write client-side web apps in Lua:

https://github.com/mherkender/lua.js

Unfortunately, there is a bug in Lua.js and it doesn't support the preferred method of creating modules[1]. For this reason, I've yet to get a substantial size app written. I'd still like to go back and fix this myself eventually, but I was sinking a lot of time into trying to get it to work.

[1] https://github.com/mherkender/lua.js/issues/13#issuecomment-...

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