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what's with Lua?

A project log for Over-engineered LED strip controller

Way too much stuff to light my garage MY way.

wjcarpenterWJCarpenter 07/16/2017 at 22:080 Comments

Earlier I said, "I don't plan to use Lua". That's mainly because of a personal bias against languages that don't really add anything except their own flavor of syntax and their own crowd of cheerleaders. I've saved myself a lot of tiresome dead ends that way. For example, if a language has built-in "dictionaries" or "maps" or whatever, it's a big yawn to me because I can get the same thing is most other languages by just calling a library of some sort.

But there is no ignoring languages that have a rich ecosystem. For example, the Arduino environment has tons of C/C++ libraries for doing all kinds of things. So, even though it's a somewhat "non-technical" environment, it is really, really handy for saving a ton of grunt work.

I've been looking through the eLua APIs and reading some of the claims made by the Lua gang. If what they say is true, then it sounds pretty compelling. Especially that it plays well with C/C++, so there is always an out if I find something it doesn't have.

I'll be considering the ecosystem differences and synergies of the Arduino and Lua camps as I get a bit closer to the software layer.

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