I ported a mod I made to Teal when adding a feature was taking me way too long in regular Lua to get working correctly (I freely admit that I'm seriously crippled without the ability to write correct algorithms without being able to define types that I can enforce). This was before I had ever tried to use an LLM to code before.
Now that LLMs are a common thing for coding, modding communities (which in practice have a large number of people using Lua since quite a lot of the most widely modded games use Lua for mods) are having to adapt a bit to handle the influx of a huge number of mods from people who have never programmed before, which I tend to view as a good thing in the long run, but right now LLMs seem to be rather abysmal at writing reasonable Lua. There's a meme (in the original sense of the word) that you can tell when a mod is LLM generated because it will use pcall in ridiculous ways, seemingly because it's a lot quicker to abuse it as a retroactive control flow mechanism than to go back and add proper checks up front (and probably restructure the code in the process). Teal doesn't fully solve the underlying issue of LLMs apparently being very poorly trained on Lua but it does at least give a pretty good way of statically enforcing what the actual types it should be using are.
Learning a new programming language and getting good at it is extermely satisfying. I get no satisfaction out of AI writing code I dont understand, its quite the opposite actually.
It will be people who understand things and experiment still that will succeed in the world of AI. People who are meat proxies are screwed its already making you lazy and probably giving your brain a disease we haven't named yet, a type 2 diabetes-esque of the brain.
Controversial opinion, but new programming languages are desperately needed, _especially_ in the age of LLMs. Simply put, not all languages provide equal expressiveness, even if they're all Turing complete.
that's not controversial to me. Programming languages that prioritize LLM creation/editing/reasons over it, while making it easy for humans to review and edit, but not being the primary author of the literal code.
Not only that, but the most important thing that a programming language does from an expressiveness perspective is define what your can't do. I often like to say that when there are an infinite number of programs you could write, programming is the act of narrowing that space until you're left with one program that you did write. Bugs are deviations from the one you were targeting, and a programming language can dramatically improve the process by eliminating a lot of the ones you don't want up front (ideally ones that might be easy to accidentally hit instead of your target)
Having never heard someone claim that before, I honestly would have assumed someone saying that was joking, because it doesn't sound like it would work well at all!
Elon Musk has predicted code will be obsolete by the end of this year, and the AI will just be writing binaries directly better than any compiler. I'll leave it to you to decide if he was serious :P
Between the drugs and all the other completely wrong things he's claimed before, his level of intended seriousness is completely irrelevant to how seriously I take anything he says, but maybe a useful data point in terms of what other out of touch CEOs might believe in coming years.
What difference does AI make? Teal simply gives you the option to add static types to your Lua code, to enable additional compile-time correctness checks.
Surely that’s useful, no matter whether you’re writing the code yourself or having an agent do it.
Not all programming languages are equal. Some are easier to review, some are faster, different ecosystems, different target architectures, many reasons.
That's like someone saying "What is the purpose of x64 in the new age of C?" back in 1999.
For all (most?) intents and purposes, Fennel is lisp-language, not just lisp-y. It's Clojure-y if anything, which makes sense considering the creator of Fennel.
Hehe, I swear anytime Fennel is mentioned this discussion comes up, no matter what the original statement is. It’s like code golfers discussing Esolang Turing completeness. :)
FWIW I didn’t mean to imply anything here, just draw the parallel between the ergonomics of transpiled Lua. Spiritually I consider Lua to be a Lisp, and Fennel a tool for revealing this quality. I’ve actually recently combined Teal and Fennel to create a statically typed Fennel compiler, which really improves QoL for larger projects. I’m doomed to enjoy lispy or command invocation languages, both of which have fallen out of style.
So? They both have type systems and such. The comparison doesn't have to be about how the result is obtained, but the developer experience is still important.
Hisham is one of the key devs there. He started GoboLinux, htop and some more.
Personally I am not the biggest fan of lua as it really is such a light language in every sense of the word (meaning, syntax too and features - too light IMO). But it's good that creativity keeps pushing things forward.
I had no idea that GoboLinux and htop were made by the same dev, let alone Teal. I can sort of see why someone who preferred to keep things simple and straightforward in a way that would lead to GoboLinux would also be involved in something directly related to Lua.
As for how light it is, I don't disagree with you that it's frustrating, but as someone who only started using it at the beginning of last year for making a mod, I've realized that in a lot of ways, it feels like it's JavaScript if it were designed properly from the start. Both use a single map data structure for everything, including having arrays be "maps with incrementing integer keys", but Lua anticipated that iteration for arrays should work differently made the loop syntax give you a way to specify which way you want. Neither has a particularly large set of APIs that are available out of the box, but Lua defined a module system from day one (I assume, I guess I don't know for sure) and even provides a way to use it as for defining objects; JavaScript has a prototypical inheritance system that's probably more complex than it ever needed to be, and it took decades for a standard way of importing things to be defined. Lua also doesn't have the famous warts of implicit type coercion for operators (including the more familiar looking of the two equality checks); I'd take arrays starting at 1 over that any day.
I don't love working in Lua, but given how unfathomable it is to me that so many people genuinely seem to enjoy JavaScript, Lua seems more than sufficient in terms of the language features at least.
These days all you gotta do is ask your local LLM to write you a Lua with 0-based indexing. Sure beats complaining about 1-based indexing on HN until the end of time.
Oh right. When I signed up for HN with the goal of complaining about 1-based indexing until the end of time, I hadn't considered that LLMs didn't exist yet. Thanks for updating my knowledge date!
Jokes aside, I tried to do a conversion like this manually some years ago, but it wouldn't really be Lua at that point. I just got bored because I knew it wouldn't really have value to anybody.
I don't see a contradiction? I specifically pointed out inclusive indexing as part of my complaint.
The funny thing is, you could say the end index is zero-indexed and exclusive and that would result in the same behavior as one-indexed and inclusive. It wouldn't make sense to make it zero-indexed and inclusive, because the inclusivity only exists in the first place to account for the one-indexing. That would be an incomplete and nonsensical conversion.
I find that in practice the amount of +-1 is about the same for zero-based and one-based indexing. Each has situations it is better suited for. For example, iterating a list backwards is nicer with one-based indexes.
I think it's inclusive indexing in general that make reverse iteration nice, not necessarily whether it's based on 1 or 0. (Namely, an ergonomic way to access the index of the last element as opposed to the length of the list. With inclusive indexing, the length is already naturally the index of the last element.)
For sure, but 0-based indexing often goes hand in hand with half-open intervals [0,n). One might even argue that a special way to access the "last index" is as unergonomic as just typing "length - 1"
Being light in every sense of the word is a primary feature of the language.
Lua is great for high-level control of a program written in C/C++. When setting that up, I’ve often appreciated that I could removed features like file I/O from the Lua standard library and the rest keeps on trucking.
Lua is terrible for writing programs by itself. People keep trying to make it happen. But, for anything non-trivial, it’s a fool’s errand.
As someone who wrote entire stacks and apps on top in LuaJIT that I got paid for and are running without any problems after many years, this is getting a little tiresome to hear.
I knew Luarocks existed, had no idea Teal did, for a second I wondered how this compared to Terra, then realized this is more TypeScript for Lua (which is fine).
It seems like type hints are good for any dynamic language, since they wind up in most of them overall.
Observation: Teal would make a great scripting language for a simpler web browser, one not based on JavaScript... maybe something like the 'Surf' web browser: (https://surf.suckless.org/).
Also, there should exist the capability to compile Teal to Wasm... or at least Teal to Lua to Wasm(!)... to that end, there exists the following GitHub repo (but I'm not sure if it's 100% operational yet):
Terra is a native language that uses Lua for both meta-programming and scripting, it doesn't emit Lua VM bytecode. The actual statically-typed frontends (which are still alive) that I known of are Teal, Luon, TypeScriptToLua and CSharp.lua.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 92.7 ms ] thread2. I don't see anything wrong with coding for purely artistic purposes?
3. Presumably a static type checker would be quite helpful for LLMs, since it would help them catch lots of their mistakes.
[0]: https://github.com/teal-language/tl/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md#0...
Now that LLMs are a common thing for coding, modding communities (which in practice have a large number of people using Lua since quite a lot of the most widely modded games use Lua for mods) are having to adapt a bit to handle the influx of a huge number of mods from people who have never programmed before, which I tend to view as a good thing in the long run, but right now LLMs seem to be rather abysmal at writing reasonable Lua. There's a meme (in the original sense of the word) that you can tell when a mod is LLM generated because it will use pcall in ridiculous ways, seemingly because it's a lot quicker to abuse it as a retroactive control flow mechanism than to go back and add proper checks up front (and probably restructure the code in the process). Teal doesn't fully solve the underlying issue of LLMs apparently being very poorly trained on Lua but it does at least give a pretty good way of statically enforcing what the actual types it should be using are.
LLMs are already so incredibly capable and will only get better and faster with time.
Learning a new programming language just feels redundant now.
It will be people who understand things and experiment still that will succeed in the world of AI. People who are meat proxies are screwed its already making you lazy and probably giving your brain a disease we haven't named yet, a type 2 diabetes-esque of the brain.
https://x.com/XFreeze/status/2021699619927781842
Surely that’s useful, no matter whether you’re writing the code yourself or having an agent do it.
Though, I am not really in the lua camp either. But I had to comment on the "only AI counts" transfigurative statement.
That's like someone saying "What is the purpose of x64 in the new age of C?" back in 1999.
It’s part of the big three Lua syntax flavours: Teal (Typescript-y), Fennel (Lisp-y), Moonscript (Ruby-ish)
For all (most?) intents and purposes, Fennel is lisp-language, not just lisp-y. It's Clojure-y if anything, which makes sense considering the creator of Fennel.
FWIW I didn’t mean to imply anything here, just draw the parallel between the ergonomics of transpiled Lua. Spiritually I consider Lua to be a Lisp, and Fennel a tool for revealing this quality. I’ve actually recently combined Teal and Fennel to create a statically typed Fennel compiler, which really improves QoL for larger projects. I’m doomed to enjoy lispy or command invocation languages, both of which have fallen out of style.
Lots to learn from each.
Techomancy is Fennel's maintainer, but Calvin Rose created it (and then Janet). Here are interviews with both:
- technomancy https://alexalejandre.com/interviews/interview-with-technoma...
- calvin rose https://alexalejandre.com/interviews/interview-with-bakpakin...
Thanks for the chuckle.
Personally I am not the biggest fan of lua as it really is such a light language in every sense of the word (meaning, syntax too and features - too light IMO). But it's good that creativity keeps pushing things forward.
As for how light it is, I don't disagree with you that it's frustrating, but as someone who only started using it at the beginning of last year for making a mod, I've realized that in a lot of ways, it feels like it's JavaScript if it were designed properly from the start. Both use a single map data structure for everything, including having arrays be "maps with incrementing integer keys", but Lua anticipated that iteration for arrays should work differently made the loop syntax give you a way to specify which way you want. Neither has a particularly large set of APIs that are available out of the box, but Lua defined a module system from day one (I assume, I guess I don't know for sure) and even provides a way to use it as for defining objects; JavaScript has a prototypical inheritance system that's probably more complex than it ever needed to be, and it took decades for a standard way of importing things to be defined. Lua also doesn't have the famous warts of implicit type coercion for operators (including the more familiar looking of the two equality checks); I'd take arrays starting at 1 over that any day.
I don't love working in Lua, but given how unfathomable it is to me that so many people genuinely seem to enjoy JavaScript, Lua seems more than sufficient in terms of the language features at least.
Jokes aside, I tried to do a conversion like this manually some years ago, but it wouldn't really be Lua at that point. I just got bored because I knew it wouldn't really have value to anybody.
Numerical loops in Lua are inclusive:
On the example above the i starts at 1 and goes up to (and including) the length of t.With 0-based indexes, and that numerical loop format, it would be minus-one everywhere:
The funny thing is, you could say the end index is zero-indexed and exclusive and that would result in the same behavior as one-indexed and inclusive. It wouldn't make sense to make it zero-indexed and inclusive, because the inclusivity only exists in the first place to account for the one-indexing. That would be an incomplete and nonsensical conversion.
Lua is great for high-level control of a program written in C/C++. When setting that up, I’ve often appreciated that I could removed features like file I/O from the Lua standard library and the rest keeps on trucking.
Lua is terrible for writing programs by itself. People keep trying to make it happen. But, for anything non-trivial, it’s a fool’s errand.
It seems like type hints are good for any dynamic language, since they wind up in most of them overall.
Also, there should exist the capability to compile Teal to Wasm... or at least Teal to Lua to Wasm(!)... to that end, there exists the following GitHub repo (but I'm not sure if it's 100% operational yet):
https://github.com/ysugimoto/webassembly-lua
1. What is the need to keep up with all of them (sheer volume - your own words)?
2. If you haven't kept up with them (as in, investigated them), how do you know they are cool and noteworthy. Just based on what others say?