Lua, a Misunderstood Language (2021)

> We usually start to count from one. When a baby completes its first roundtrip around the Sun, they’re one year old, not zero years old. And before they complete the first trip, they're 0 years old, showing that you start from a count of 0. The one is the result from the first increment. If I ask you to count the number of red balls in a bag with only 3 yellow balls, then the initial count in your…

> Complaints about 1-based indexing for arrays I think this misses the point, at least for my case. It doesn't matter which is technically better. What makes more sense for humans is a matter of application (and even "non-dev" stuff varies as to which is better). For me, my big concern about using Lua in my products is - I expect other developers to be writing the Lua scripts - I expect the developers to be frequently using 0-indexed languages…

For programs less than about 10k lines or so, Lua exists in a class of its own. It offers nearly optimal start up latency and the interpreter is fast enough that it can interpret said 10k lines about as fast as python can run hello, world. This means you can iterate by configuring your editor to save on every keystroke and in a terminal run say `ls foo.lua | entr -c lua(jit) foo.lua` and get nearly instantaneous feedback with every…