Dev's debugging paradise

Who thought Lua was a good idea for extending gameplay functionality??

It's weakly typed, has no OOP functionality and no namespace rules. It has no interesting data structures and tables are a goddamn mystery. Somebody made the simplest language they could and now everybody who touches it is given the broadest possible tools to shoot themselves in the foot.

Lua's ease of embedding into C++ code is a fool's paradise. Warcraft 3's JASS scripting language had way more structure and produced much better games, whilst being much simpler to work with than Lua.

All the academics describing metatables as 'powerful extensionality' and a fill-in for OOP are digging the hole deeper. Using tables to implement classes doesn't work easily outside school. Hiding a self:reference to a function inside of syntactic sugar is just insanity.

Nobody expects to write a triple-A game in lua, but they are happy to fob it off to kids learning to program. WoW made the right choice limiting it to UI extensions.

Fighting the language so you can try and understand a poorly documented game engine and implement gameplay features as the dev's intend for 'modders', is just beyond the pale. It's very difficult to figure out what the standard for extending functionality is, when everybody is making it up as they go along and you don't have a strongly-typed and structured language to make it obvious what the devs intended.

If you want to give your players a coding sandbox, make the scripting language yourself like JASS. It will be way better fit for purpose, way easier to limit for security and to guarantee reasonable performance. Your players get a sane environment to work in and you just might get the next DOTA.

Repeatedly shooting yourself in the foot on invisible syntax errors and an incredibly broad language is wasted suffering for kids that could be learning the programming concepts that cross all languages way quicker and with way more satisfying results.

Lua is hot garbage for it's most popular application, I really don't get it. Just stop!

As I walk through the valley of the shadow of dev
I take a look at my life and realize there's nothin' left
‘Cause I've been codin' and proper formattin' so long that
even my momma thinks that my mind is gone
But I ain't never del'd a row that didn't deserve it
Me be treated like a punk, you know that's unheard of
You better watch how you codin' and what you pastin'
Or you and your homies might be lined in Q
I really hate to trip, but I gotta loc
As they croak, I see myself in the compiler smoke
Fool,
I'm the kinda D that little homies wanna be like
On my keys middle row, typin' prayers on stackoverflow
Keep spending most our lives
Livin' in a dev's paradise
Been spending most their lives
Livin' in a dev's paradise