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The Language of Lua


By Andrew Binstock
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October 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 2)
The past several months have seen a lot of ink spilled on the rise of dynamic languages. The reason for this resurgent interest in scripting, I believe, is the confluence of two factors: the speed of today’s hardware and the recovery from what one pundit labeled the “Java nuclear winter.” The latter refers to a phenomenon that has been consistently overlooked in the suddenly chic castigations of Java.

At the time Java was launched, it represented a very substantial step forward from the state of the art, C++. Java’s promise of universal portability and its built-in garbage collection, immutable strings and lack of a preprocessor or conditional compilation were all very different ways of looking at the world that resonated deeply with developers. While these innovations came from other languages, Java was the first mainstream language to bring them all together.

I hasten to add that this was true innovation and Java was embraced by many developers the same way that Ruby is today—as a brilliant alternative to the bloated de facto language of the day. As some veteran readers will surely recall, there was considerable doubt as to whether Java would actually succeed in its core mission: less buggy code and true portability. It was not until Sun worked out the last JVM kinks and Microsoft’s attempt to extend the platform was finally smashed down that we all knew Java had turned the corner and would succeed in its ambitious mission.

That period—the mid-1990s—was a fertile time for the creation of dynamic languages. PHP (released in 1995), Ruby (1995), Lua (1993) and Python slightly earlier are all part of the same generation as Java. And in toto they were a statement about the need for a high-level alternative to C/C++ that would be less narrow than the “little languages” used in Unix (such as awk, sed and shell scripts) and not proprietary like the many 4GLs floating around at the time.




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