I saw someone describe python as “stressful” for this reason and I couldn’t agree more. It’s difficult to have confidence in any change I make or review. I need to sit down and manually exercise codepaths because I don’t get the guarantees I crave from the language or tooling. While with the small amount of Rust code I’ve written lately I could yolo changes into production with no stress.

>This meant when we update a function signature we would often incorrectly update call sites, etc.

The same thing happened with our huge legacy PHP monolith, which was written before type hints were a thing. Developers were reluctant to refactor large chunks of code when the time came, because it was just too easy to introduce bugs - you couldn’t be confident about anything without manually digging through tons of code. So, when business requirements changed, they’d just bolt on some hacks to avoid touching the existing, tested code, and call it a day. It became a self-reinforcing loop: fear of refactoring → more hacks to avoid refactoring → more brittle code → even more fear of refactoring. Eventually, they added type hints and a linter to analyze them, but by that point you start to wonder - why are we even using a dynamic language and fighting its quirks?

> With dynamically typed languages I feel it's better to wait until you've tried to maintain the code for a while before you consider the languages effectiveness.

True for any language really. There's an entire category of blog posts: "I used language X for 2 weeks and here's my hot take". Okay, great. But what do you really know? For every language I've used for a serious amount of time I've changed opinion over time. Some things that seemed like neat ideas at the start turned out to be not so neat ideas down the line. Or things I considered pointless or even stupid at the start turned out to be very useful once I better understood the nuances and/or got used to working with it.

And of course it's double hard to judge will come back to haunt you a year down the line.

Even as an experienced programmer I find it hard to properly judge any of that from just a few weeks.

One of my coworkers described Python (specifically in reference to a niche framework, but I think it applies generally) as "a bucket of play-doh filled with broken glass"

I understand your frustrations since you are forced to work within a codebase that is shared with other developers with varying levels of experience. Lua was from the get-go never supposed to be a standalone language, it is more of a complimentary language and if you fail to respect that then it becomes unwieldy, quick. It is extremely easy to shoot yourself in the foot with the language and once bad design decisions creep in it is hurts a LOT. However once you get enough experience with the language you manage stay within the "happy path" (which is EXTREMELY difficult when you are on a team with salaried software engineers with different and often misaligned incentives) it is actually one of the best languages available.

One of the things I suspect your team is doing wrong is you are using the PUC Lua C API instead of the LuaJIT FFI. That is one of those things which just completely destroys the "happy path". The PUC Lua C api is effectively a deprecated feature at this point. A few years ago you could have made the argument that the PUC Lua C API is more portable than LuaJIT which is absolutely true. But q66's (from Chimera Linux fame) cffi-lua project nullifies that argument since you can now use the luajit-style FFI in PUC Lua, which works on every platform that libffi supports.

Again I understand your frustrations with the language since you are working within a fundamentally adversarial environment. Perverse incentives can easily destroy any good patterns you can establish since the language is so flexible. I implore you to explore the language outside of your day job.

Yeah I had a pretty high opinion of Lua when I first used it, then I came back to code I'd written years earlier, and the lack of types just made it a nightmare.

It really could use a fully statically typed layer that compiles down to Lua, and also fixes some of the stupid stuff such as 1 based indexing and lack of increment ops etc.

>when interfacing between C and Lua

Except for the indexing mismatch, I've found calling Lua from C and vise-verse very easy.

I think that much of game development is unlike a lot of other kinds of programming, where there's often more ad hoc game mechanic prototyping than maintenance. This is where dynamic programming excels. But of course, that consideration needs to be balanced against others.

you might like this one: https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep ... it sounds like you'd get some mileage out of it.

They mention Luau near the end, and my opinion is that Luau is a significant improvement. Mainly because of the optional typing, but the other features too are each small but impactful quality of life improvements.

> dynamically typed languages like Python or Typescript

You likely mean JavaScript. Typescript is very much statically typed, unless you allow everything to be `any` and `unknown`.

Typescript is mentioned in TFA as a desired (but not available) option, because of the great static typechecking support.

Years ago I wrote/maintained a modal console-based email client. It was written with some UI primitives in C++ and the UI actually maintained and controlled by lua.

Viewing a list of folders? Lua. Viewing a list of messages? lua. Viewing a single message? Lua. Those were the three main modes and UI options.

All the keybindings, layout, colour setup, and similar was dynamic. It actually worked out really well. For comparison I just ran "wc -l" against he codebase: 60k lines. Combination of C++ and Lua, but mostly Lua.

Having good scope and good tests made such a thing fine to support. Mostly the pain was broken MIME messages and handling dealing with the external world - e.g. invoking gpg to handle decryption and encryption.

I'd work with big-lua again if I had the need, it's a fun language and very flexible.

> it will not crumble under its own weight

It is possible to make it not crumble under its own weight, right? I had my share of Lua nightmare with more than 100K lines of code back when I was a gamedev [1], and it seems that there are some requirements in order to remain sane with the growth. Thankfully there are now multiple working type checkers for Lua, unlike when I had to built my own.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18351788 is my canonical answer, but I have written many other comments about Lua which should be easy to search.

> LuaJIT is not mentioned even once

Defold uses LuaJIT (except for web which I think uses Lua 5.1 compiled to wasm?), so it's taken for granted.

I read half the article and little is told in it in general. You'd expect some deeper developer reflections on a 60kloc project. Like, much deeper. The part about "spacer" hints that the second half won't surprise either. There's just not enough general xp to make conclusions.

60k? try Roblox’s 60bajillion!

But not nearly as many as my Emacs config.

This made me laugh.

He may not be super expert, but he doesn't pretend to be. His experience is still valid even if he doesn't really understand what functional programming is yet. (His example isn't just boolean logic.)

Being surprised by aliasing would have happened the same way in many languages, but not everything but C. It can happen in C too! But maybe in Python you would have used an (x, y) tuple and gotten an error from trying to mutate it, and certainly in Haskell or OCaml you wouldn't introduce mutability implicitly. In Tcl there's no way to get that problem in a list of lists, and in languages like Golang or Rust or C# you'd probably use an array of structs which would also be immune to aliasing. You could have the same problem, but it's less likely. I've known experienced programmers who were surprised by aliasing bugs, and even had trouble debugging them, maybe because they spent a lot of time in languages where they were possible but less likely.

What do you mean about ignorance of type annotations?

The example is not just boolean logic! In Lua logical ops, the last evaluated value is returned. The example makes use of that to assign something other than a bool. Not all languages do that. In Java for example, boolean logic always evaluates to a bool.

I'm not sure which part of that you missed, but maybe don't go too hard on calling others inexperienced based on your takes.

Reads tongue in cheek but also to be clear, as a PUC-Rio alum I can say there's no such thing as a collective "pontifical catholic universities" board that determines how programming languages behave or how students and faculty should go about their businesses in a software engineering class...

The functional code isn't reassigning the same variable. The and/or have something that looks like an implicit return.

Beyond All Reason is a SpringTA fork (hack? build?) like Zero-K? So the underlying engine isn't Lua, but higher level scripting is. I'm pretty sure this is fairly common, or was once.

Other games with Lua scripting: Roblox, Baldur's Gate, Civilization VI, Crysis, Factorio, World of Warcraft, Far Cry, Leadwerks, Friday Night Funkin', Foldit, Garry's Mod, Aquaria, Balanced Annihilation, Bitfighter, Bos Wars, Cataclysm, CivCity: Rome, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Company of Heroes, Cortex Command, Counter-Strike 2D, Crimson Steam Pirates, Dota 2, Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, Dungeons, Dungeons II, Dungeons III, Elven Legacy, Empire: Total War, Escape from Monkey Island, Eufloria, Exodus from the Earth, Angry Birds.

Recently released, Moonring and Balatro are both written in Lua, and I think both with LÖVE.

>This is the second game I've found out recently that is written in Lua. The first one one being - Beyond All Reason.

Lua is traditionally the scripting language of choice for game development. It was absolutely ubiquitous in the industry before the days of Unreal/Unity. Famously, all of the WoW UI was Lua.

YOYOZO, my game that received a "Best Games of 2023" accolade, was also written in Lua. It is only 39KB despite containing two music tracks, physics and particle systems, online high score board, dynamic sounds, two fonts, a tutorial and more. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372936

LOVE is a popular Lua game framework, so quite a few indie games are written in it.

Most of Heroes of Newerth's in-game logic is written in Lua.

Grim fandango too

Last 50 years?

Have you studied Software Engineering? They discuss LOC in depth and many academic papers on KLOC are in SE literature.

Do you really think LoC does not impact maintainability? How much depends on language and adjacent tooling for things like refactors, but the larger a code base the harder it is to maintain in general.