#lang Lua
I feel the need to ramble slightly OT on how great Lua is:  I was looking for an architecture&#x2F;tech stack recently that would allow me to develop a cross-platform desktop GUI. 
 I went on a several-weeks-long fact finding mission (the longest of its kind I&#x27;ve ever done in my 10 years as a professional software developer).<p>The option that won was to write all business logic (a few thousand lines of code) in Lua, then write the GUI in each platform&#x27;s native language+ui-library combination and re-use the same business logic by embedding Lua.<p>Another option that made the shortlist was using Haxe instead of Lua, but after several weeks of active Haxe development, it became clear that that was a bad idea, and with Lua, the developer experience is now so much better.<p>I definitely plan on continuing to use Lua as my main programming language.<p>This comes after 20 years of having python as my main programming language because I&#x27;m displeased with feature creep and bloat on python.  With lua, I find that I barely miss any features&#x2F;abilities from the vastly more complex python while the simplicity of lua means my code gets to &quot;go places&quot; where python can&#x27;t go.<p>With lua, you find casual implementers making fully compatible alternative implementations (e.g. NeoLua for C#, Luna for Java, fengari for JavaScript, ...)  With Python, alternative implementations seemingly just can&#x27;t keep up with the pace at which CPython is introducing unnecessary new features and CPython-compatbility is de-facto the only meaningful python standard there is.  Jython and IronPython would make the platform so much more appealing, but they appear dead in the water.  Python implementations for the browser pop up every couple of years only to see little adoption and quietly disappear again.<p>What&#x27;s more: Once you&#x27;ve settled on Lua as an embedding language, developers of Lua logic are free to use not just Lua, but they can pick from a host of cool transpile-to-Lua languages [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hengestone&#x2F;lua-languages" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hengestone&#x2F;lua-languages</a>