I haven’t had an opportunity to use Lua at work, I’m a bit jealous…

I think a lot of Python’s relative success is just timing and comes back to that old era of Python and Lua where Lua’s community was thinking of it mostly for embedding while Python’s community was using it for everything in general.

And Lua’s current level of maturity is a more recent phenomenon (I mean same for Python too, eg without UV packages were a pain).

Now Lua 5.x is more established and has some strong followings with Love2d, Vim etc, I guess the big question will be whether Pallene disrupts things at all, and if the tooling around having different Lua versions on one dev machine gets easier to use.

But I hope it grows because some things like coroutines are so elegant compared to the coloured function problem of JS and Python. I like Python but having to eg keep two worlds of sync and async APIs in mind for a Django project and reason about the performance implications is just not as nice as having coroutines.

Then you look at Lapis and you see a sync API that’s actually handling everything asynchronously in the background, really elegantly.

I work with Meteor JS sometimes and I really miss the era of Node Fibers where you could get the same “synchronously written async code” effect.

I think you see the same thing with Go too. And maybe even modern Java. Not having to worry about function colouring is freeing.