> it feels like it departs from what people know without good reasons.
Lua is a pretty old language. In 1993 the world had not really settled on C style syntax. Compared to Perl or Tcl, Lua's syntax seems rather conventional.
Some design decisions might be a bit unusual, but overall the language feels very consistent and predictable. JS is a mess in comparison.
> because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax
Huh? Lua's syntax is actually very Algol-like since it uses keywords to delimit blocks (e.g. if ... then ... end)
I known for very long time that c (and co) inherited the syntax from algol.
But only after long time I tried to check what Algol actually looked like. To my surprise, Algol does not look anything like C to me.
I would be quite interested in the expanded version of “C has inherited syntax from Algol”
Edit: apparently the inheritance from Algol is a formula: lexical scoping + value returning functions (expression based) - parenthesitis. Only last item is about visual part of the syntax.
That's what matters to me, not how similar Lua is to other languages, but that the language is well-designed in its own system of rules and conventions. It makes sense, every part of it contributes to a harmonious whole. JavaScript on the other hand.
When speaking of Algol or C-style syntax, it makes me imagine a "Common C" syntax, like taking the best, or the least common denominator, of all C-like languages. A minimal subset that fits in your head, instead of what modern C is turning out to be, not to mention C++ or Rust.
I don't write modern C for daily use, so I can't really say. But I've been re-learning and writing C99 more these days, not professionally but personal use - and I appreciate the smallness of the language. Might even say C peaked at C99. I mean, I'd be crazy to say that C-like languages after C99, like Java, PHP, etc., are all misguided for how unnecessarily big and complex they are. It might be that I'm becoming more like a caveman programmer as I get older, I prefer dumb primitive tools.
C11 adds a couple of nice things like static asserts which I use sometimes to document assumptions I make.
They did add some optional sections like bounds checking that seem to have flopped, partly for being optional, partly for being half-baked. Having optional sections in general seems like a bad idea.
IDK about C11; but C99 doesn't change a lot compared to ANSI C. You can read The C Programming Language 2nd edition and pick up C99 in a week. It adds boleans, some float/complex math ops, an optional floating point definition and a few more goodies:
C++ by comparison it's a behemoth. If C++ died and, for instance, the FLTK guys rebased their libraries into C (and Boost for instance) it would be a big loss at first but Chromium and the like rewritten in C would slim down a bit, the complexity would plummet down and similar projects would use far less CPU and RAM.
It's not just about the binary size; C++ today makes even the Common Lisp standard (even with UIOP and some de facto standard libraries from QuickLisp) pretty much human-manageable, and CL always has been a one-thousand pages thick standard with tons of bloat compared to Scheme or it's sibling Emacs Lisp. Go figure.
C++ is a katamari ball of programming trends and half baked ideas. I get why google built golang, as they were already pretty strict about what parts of the c++ sediments you were allowed to use.
Not Google actually, but the same people from C, AWK and Unix (and 9front, which is "Unix 2.0" and it has a simpler C (no POSIX bloat there) and the compilers are basically the philosophy of Golang (cross compile from any to any arch, CSP concurrency...)
Originally Go used the Ken C compilers for Plan9. It still uses CSP. The syntax it's from Limbo/Inferno, and probably the GC came from Limbo too.
If any, Golang was created for Google by reusing a big chunk of plan9 and Inferno's design, in some cases even straightly, as it shows with the concurrency model. Or the cross-compiling suite.
A bit like MacOS X under Apple. We all know it wasn't born in a vacuum. It borrowed Mach, the NeXTStep API and the FreeBSD userland and they put the Carbon API on top for compatibility.
Before that, the classic MacOS had nothing to do with Unix, C, Objective C, NeXT or the Mach kernel.
Mac OS X is to NeXT what Go is for Alef/Inferno/Plan9 C.
As every MacOS user it's using something like NeXTStep with the Macintosh UI design for the 21th century, Go users are like using a similar, futuristic version of the Limbo/Alef programming languages with a bit of the Plan9 concurrency and automatic crosscompilation.
That's wonderful how you tied those threads together to describe Go's philosophical origins. I'm having a great time exploring the links. And the parallel with NeXTSTEP is fascinating too, I've been interested in that part of software history since learning that Tim Berners-Lee created WorldWideWeb.app on the NeXTcube.
Not just philosphical; I've read somewhere that the first Go releases in order to bootstrap themselves they bundled the plan9 forked/simplified C compilers inside. Later releases are written in Go themselves.
There is no philosophical or technical continuity. Go is really not the continuation of anything from Bell labs, not the philosophy, not the technologies, and especially not its purposes.
Go was created at Google, for Google, by Google employees. They looked at how Google was using C++ at that time, sat down, and created a new language that would suit that task more. Here's an article of what and how by Rob Pike https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...
It's as much of a Google project as anything can be. "C++ is a katamari ball of programming trends and half baked ideas. I get why google built golang, as they were already pretty strict about what parts of the c++ sediments you were allowed to use." is entirely correct regarding history.
Lua is a pretty old language. In 1993 the world had not really settled on C style syntax. Compared to Perl or Tcl, Lua's syntax seems rather conventional.
Some design decisions might be a bit unusual, but overall the language feels very consistent and predictable. JS is a mess in comparison.
> because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax
Huh? Lua's syntax is actually very Algol-like since it uses keywords to delimit blocks (e.g. if ... then ... end)