A Very Simple Class Implementation in Lua

The article provides a factual overview of implementing a simple class in Lua, contrasting Lua's elegance with the complexity of other scripting environments like Python and JavaScript. It criticizes Python's packaging system and the fragmented JavaScript ecosystem, while noting that these issues are systemic and difficult to resolve.

Lua is a beautiful language. Most scripting languages will make you feel dirty at some point. Packaging a project in Python is a hellscape littered with broken glass, plus it’s about three thousand source files between the C stuff and the Python stuff. V8 is roughly two million lines of source code, and the ecosystem around it is fractured and generally gorged to exploding with transpilers and polyfills and bundlers other various flavors of bullshit. This is fine, in the same way that traffic in my city Atlanta is fine. It’s terrible, and it makes you want to stay away from your car, but nobody’s really to blame. Institutional problems, sure, and the general shit-rolls-downhill quality of the actions of large groups, but it’s really just this thing that Sucks and that you can’t do anything about.