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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

Show me the programming language community that's a fan of the language it's intending to supplant and we'll talk. :)

I've never seen Python or Lua community do that so far. But Python is its own animal (which IMO is only highlighting how good it is), it's not supplanting anything. Rust meanwhile both hates C and piggybacks on it (using LLVM, similar syntax, cited compatibility and coexistence with C). Lua is similar, no hate, its own animal, custom syntax, good in its niche (Python's niche seems to be literally everything not super performance critical BTW). Same for Erlang and Elixir, custom, different languages that are masters of their niche (and go see people gushing over these two on HN, they don't shit on other languages but say how good these are, no "Pfsshh, it's 2017, only idiot would write a reliable service in C, you can't program C ever, it's broken").

I've never seen Python or Lua community do that so far.

Back then, wasn't it readable Python versus unreadable Perl?

You have a point. Python was definitely pitched as a perl replacement. We forget because it pretty much won.

Lua has it's own problems, of course, but I don't see it as a language developed as a consequence of frustrations with another.

Lua was developed for legal reasons: huge tariffs on foreign software meant that Brazilian companies often found it cheaper to develop custom toolchains, which is what gave us Lua.

D has a much better attitude towards it.

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