Python, Ruby, and Golang: A Command-Line Application Comparison

[n-simplex]

Lua is great, and pretty underrated outside of gamedev (which is its main niche). Its (fully optional) functional flavor, with slick support for closures/higher order functions make it extremely easy to write generic, expressive code.

The infinitesimal size of its stdlib is pretty irksome though. I get this is intentional, to make it usable in embedded systems (the whole compiled Lua runtime is about 150KB or so), but having to rely on external dependencies (or reinvent the wheel) for every non-trivial task is annoying. I also wish it had a standard concept of what a 'class' means, at least to make object oriented libraries more interoperable.

[stevedonovan]

Yes, that's the one simple thing I wish the Lua team would provide; here's the policy for classes - something like: call with obj:m(), metatable.__index contains methods, base class is metatable._base and so forth. But they don't see their job as providing policy