Suitability of Lua as a userland-programming language?

On Thu, Sep 05, 2024 at 08:25:26AM +0100, David Chisnall wrote:
>
> It took me about an hour to go from never having written any Lua to
> writing some Lua code that actually worked (and that we still use).

	I made the same observation here, I must add that having a
funcional programming background helps greatly. The conciseness of the
reference manual is lovely even if I think it is badly organised.

	I regret the "any variable name is assumed to be global unless
explicitly declared as a local" concept which preclude users from
writing large programs easily. 1-indexed strings is... peculiar by
modern times. I see the language libraries as very limited and
unsuitable for system programming---I was frustrated to not find map
nor reduce. If Lua is to be integrated into base for public
consumption we should beforehand write an extensive library of tool
functions that would include at least strings and tables
manipulations, functional abstractions, a sanctioned object system and
a complete set of system interfaces. By extensive I mean
Python-scale. That is a large project, do we have sufficient
ressources to conduct it from design to documentation?

-- 
%!PS -- Bertrand Petit
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