Lua

I have been hearing a lot about Lua. Apparently it is very popular in game development circles. I love to read about the history of things, and Lua has a nice page for that.

They say:

"The main contenders were Tcl and, far behind, Forth and Perl."

That's pretty interesting to see. What made them not use Tcl?

"In 1993, Tcl and Perl ran only on Unix platforms."

That's a real shame. I was introduced to Tcl in 1999, when there was already a Windows version. I'm not sure when the code was first ported to Windows, I found a Usenet post from comp.lang.tcl called "New Release of TkWin -- Tk for Windows" discussing version 0.2, from Jul 18 1994. Incredible to think there may not have been a Lua by so slim a margin...

So, could Lua be a replacement for Tcl for me?

Lua feels like "everything is a table". This causes the problem that tables are not a primitive type, so there are also types for numbers and strings (as well as boolean). The syntax is vaguely C (actually more Pascal).

The use of tables seems to give easy access to object oriented programming. That is something Tcl is weaker on (mostly from the "too many choices" problem). I'm not too concerned about OO in my scripting. Scripting is for fast development, OO is for structure and maintenance.

I think I will pass on Lua for now.