yujiri , vor 2 Monaten

@foone my guess is it's slightly better

suetanvil , vor 2 Monaten

@foone

Having spent far too much of my life overthinking this, I will now share:

1. Lua hadn't really made it to North America by 1995; the go-to extension language at the time was Tcl or a Lisp dialect. (Perl was an option but not really suited to embedding, and Python was this new thing nobody used.)

2. Java was THE HYPE in 1994; JS has its syntax because management wanted that similarity.

So the obvious design for JS is OOP Lisp with C syntax. And that's what we got, only bad.

stib , vor 2 Monaten

@foone Yeah, but what if python?

enkiv2 , vor 2 Monaten

@foone

Honestly, being embedded in web browsers might have basically ruined scheme too.

me , vor 2 Monaten

@foone having used both, they are remarkably similar from the 10000ft altitude. So, I think that universe would be mostly indistinguishable from the one we live in.

crmsnbleyd , vor 2 Monaten

@foone will write a post abt this if that's okay. One day, maybe a thriller novel as wrll

larsmb , vor 2 Monaten

@foone Client-side PHP.

amberage , vor 2 Monaten

@foone ok google is lua statically typed? no? no better then

thejpster , vor 2 Monaten

@foone there’s another universe where VBScript was the winner

foone OP , vor 2 Monaten

@thejpster that's definitely a worse world

darkling , vor 2 Monaten

@foone And the much closer one where they invented JS, but used scheme and S-expressions instead of C-style syntax.

Farbs , vor 2 Monaten

@foone I'm probably wrong, but I like to think that if they started by embedding Lua they would have just stopped there, instead of doing whatever JS is now.