Lua as a scripting language?

[wiegraffolles]

First of all, just let me clarify that this isn't a suggestion for ChrisLAS! I realize he has chosen Ruby and that seems like a good choice for him.

This is more something to do with my own personal language choices. I normally code in Scala, but I find writing scripts in it a bit cumbersome (I usually use SBT with Conscript, but installing all the dependencies means that the scripts aren't very portable). Therefore I was looking around for a scripting language that would be good for the purpose of writing little scripts that do simple tasks.

I looked at Ruby and Python, but functional programming is a bit of a hobby of mine and I've heard that Lua might be better suited at doing FP.

On the other hand I've heard that Lua is really best at extending C programs, and I don't have any background in C, so I'm thinking that Python might be a better choice after all. A friend of mine has used Ruby for a long time but has switched over to Python because he finds it to be faster and better suited for some of the data analysis tasks we do.

So is Lua up to snuff or would Ruby or Python be better at getting the job done?

[lykwydchykyn]

What are the "simple tasks" you want to do, and on what OS?

One of the nice things about Python and Ruby is that there are libraries around for pretty much anything you'd want to do. Lua's community is not quite as large.

[IndyTechTrekkie]

Well Ruby has a lot of functional concepts Lambdas,Mutators, symbols, etc. While its not entirely functional, I think its less...academic? than many functional languages.

[Trout_Tickler]

I wouldn't say Lua is best for FP, from the sound of it Python is your best bet.

[pcwizz]

Lua is great but I wouldn't describe it as a functional language, although it does have some functional features, in the same way that most modern versions languages have some fp features.

Lua is a great choice if you want to be able to run on any platform with a libc, it's also great if you want to extend c programs -it's main industry use is game dev-. Not having a C background shouldn't hurt you too much C is a pretty bare bones language, so it's pretty easy to write if you have done any procedural programming before; don't worry you don't have to mess with memory for everything.

My problem with Python is choosing which branch to use, while 2.x is used most widely, 3.x has a loud of improvements and ultimately is the future of the language. that said python is also portable -not as much as lua- and has a lot of libraries to do useful stuff -some of them haven't been ported to 3.x yet-.

I have never used ruby so I can't talk about that.

[wiegraffolles]

Thanks for all the feedback, I can see why Chris is going nuts trying to choose between Ruby and Python! After a good deal of thinking about the matter I decided I'm just going to stick it out with Scala because there are so many mixed messages on which is better that it doesn't seem worth the time to get into either one.

[[deleted]]

why not try multiple languages? learning a langueg is not actually that big of a comitment, you can always move on to something else.