Why I Chose Lua for This Blog

What are your thoughts on something like arturo which I know is quite recent but it has a lot of features for scripting and an argument might in fact be made that it is in fact it might have too many batteries but it was an absolute pleasure to learn and I had a lot of aha moments in their discord server and the community was really pleasant to follow through actually.

I know its definitely smaller but I just want your opinions on it and what you might think of the language and I may be a bit sorry if this comes across as a little off topic but your blog really reminded me of arturo and my attempts on creating something like hugo in arturo but the project was abandoned mid way but if I remember correctly it was just some 50 lines of code to convert from markdown to complete website or even less since arturo's battery include markdown syntax as well as well as a web server and its written in nim which I cherish too.

I am genuinely interested in your opinions about it!

https://arturo-lang.io/

Why would you build your blog to fail if some article on it ever gets popular? The fact that the most hits you ever received was 50k in a week isn't relevant; a single important post could receive that in seconds.

It basically costs nothing to pre-render a static site, which then serves several orders of magnitude faster. I'm confused why anyone would do it this way in this day and age.

I currently run a blog generator I wrote in fennel and have been considering switching to pollen haha. Slightly surprised you didn’t pick fennel over lua since you used racket before. Is there a reason you didn’t?

I don't have a background in web development and have a genuine question.

> Your blog is your place to experiment and program how you want it

I 100% agree with your statement and people don't need to justify their hobbies. I've done really pointless things simply for lolz and because I wanted.

My question arises because I was surprised in how ... architected and (dare I say) complex the tech stack in your blog is. In my blogging days I wrote my own HTML/CSS and published it on a Internet facing server. Later, I've used CSS templates and Markdown-to-HTML to generate the static content. What is the purpose of Lua and having a database and all the other complexity for what seems like a static blog? Again, "because I wanted to experiment" or "sharpen my skills" is a totally valid answer but seeing I don't have a background in web development I am inquiring to see if there is a technical reason for doing this. Would be curious to learn what, if any, technical problem warrants such a set up :)

Why not choose Hugo (https://gohugo.io) or Zola (https://www.getzola.org ?. Both are pretty well-supported by communities and have tonnes of blog themes. (Hugo has a truckload and is the top-3 widely deployed SSG's)

Why not go with redbean?

I guess it provides less freedom/flexibility on the dev side. You're forced to use LuaJIT, and you're forced to buy into OpenResty's coroutine paradigm where global variables act weird, and stuff like that. Also I bet it doesn't play super nice with LuaRocks.

Totally valid choice to make, but in my opinion OP is missing out. OpenResty is state of the art and has a ton of great libraries embedded in it. It's "batteries included" so to speak, and the batteries are well designed. Yichun Zhang is one of the GOATs, along with Mike Pall. And Roberto, obviously.

I am more familiar with Caddy and The way OpenResty uses Lua was never very clear to me in my cursory 40 minutes attempt to use it.

Still a good project when one learns a new programming language.

Everything web-facing, if it's not a static website delivered by a well-tested web server, happens in a high-risk environment. And doubly so, if, like in this case, stuff like custom cgi libraries are involved. One has to be either very confident in their skills to do that or very, very brave.

When I was a teenager I wrote my first "CMS" and was very proud. A few months later someone called my parents and asked for me. He said he was a developer and found some issues with security. He gave me a few tipps and suggested me some books and left for good. Never talked to hm again but this was so kind and I learned a lot about secure coding after that.

I suppose it's because fewer people have personal web sites these days?

What is the typical learning project these days for beginners of a programming language?

I keep thinking a nice client app that is mostly working against a directory of markdown files that "publishes" to an option of fastly/denoland/cloudflare as mostly-static content would be a pretty nice option.

The blog/data directory can be backed up or even using a github repository for long term raw storage.

I'm not a fan of having the same site/application for rendering as editing the blog as it tends to become too much of a big/easy target... ie: Wordpress, how much internet traffic is script bots trying WP exploits?

I wrote my own DSL to write my own blogging engine with embedded Lua, jq, mustache, and more:

https://github.com/williamcotton/webpipe

My blog code:

https://github.com/williamcotton/williamcotton.com/blob/mast...

  GET /hello/:world
    |> jq: `{ world: .params.world }`
    |> handlebars: `<p>hello, {{world}}</p>`
  
  describe "hello, world"
    it "calls the route"
      when calling GET /hello/world
      then status is 200
      and output equals `<p>hello, world</p>`

Perhaps people's tastes vary? I find Lua an easy to use language. Easy to embed into C/C++ projects for scripting purposes. Also great when you can only spare 100 kB or so for an interpreter. (Arguably that was more important in the past.)

There are languages that compile to Lua. Have you investigated those? For example, you can use a TypeScript syntax and pick up free typechecking along the way: https://typescripttolua.github.io/

There's also the venerable MoonScript: https://moonscript.org/

And YueScript, a personal fave: https://yuescript.org/doc/

A whole list: https://github.com/hengestone/lua-languages

it's easy, but the 1 indexes and global by default suck

  for i=1,#arr do
    foo(arr[i])
  end

    for (0..$#arr) {
        foo(arr[$_])
    }

It all depends on what you been exposed to in the past, right? I find Lua simple because it is a minimalist language in which there are very few things to learn. You can buy "Programming in Lua" for the version you want to use and with a single book you learn about basically all of the language and its internals. That is not the same with some other languages.

Agree, I find it a PITA. I think the good reviews are in contrast to C++ and vimscript. Fine for a small embedded script, but I hope WASM or some better language ecosystem starts to fill this niche.

I absolutely love Lua. It’s like scheme without the ((())((((()(((())))( noise.

The thing that always sticks out to me with Lua is the and/or operators. It's such a minor thing but the way they are used drives me absolutely nuts.

I would suggest using it to add scripting functionality to your own C or C++ project. That's when it really clicked for me.

When you're doing stuff in nvim or HammerSpoon, you're dealing with someone else's interface and the decisions that they've made.

It really depends. I learned Lua in order to contribute to kulala plugin for neovim and found the language nice and easy to learn.

Of course it has its warts, but given the topic, almost everything is better than a vimscript imho.

I’ve never understood what people like about it

Speaking for myself at least, after you've been blogging for a quarter century or more there are some nice features you might want like pagination of your table-of-contents, RSS feeds (do it, everyone should do it), support for redirects so that ancient links mostly work across those decades (I've kept redirects from like three or four blogging systems now), tags pages for finding lost treasures and silly things. I been on both sides of "needing" comments tools over the decades, similar with things like WebMentions. With so much of blogging on social media WebMentions don't seem that big a deal this decade as it was in the one where every other person (in college) had at least one Blogger.com Blog or LiveJournal and a lot of discussions were cross-links between blogs.

Admittedly most of my blogging history has been something of a path towards simplification from hand-rolled PHP+MySQL, with custom "forum code" markup language, stuff before "blogging" was even an agreed upon term for it (and before Markdown was anywhere near as pervasive), to complex third-party beasts like Drupal, to homegrown Python (and reStructuredText), to very simple SSG tools (these days still Jekyll, but I don't like working in Ruby much, so I keep debating a switch to Lume but I don't think its Redirects plugin is yet compatible enough with GitHub Pages for my liking and I haven't tested its RSS support yet, both of which are personal hard requirements).

I had that thought too. My own blogging engine is ~100 lines of lua that accomplishes the same as you describe, plus RSS, with one additional library for markdown parsing. The author mentions Mustache templates and WebMentions, but ten dependencies still seems like a lot; I wonder what they are.

    cmark
    dkjson
    etlua
    hasher
    lsqlite3
    lua-markdown-extra
    luafilesystem
    lub
    lustache
    multipart
    penlight
    uuid
    yaml
    http
    gumbo
    sleep
    bbcode
    cookie

I had a similar setup in the past. The current stack can be explained by:

1. I don't want to rely on any external SaaS but my VPS. No github action to rebuild the site or anything like that.

2. I want to be able to post from multiple devices, which means that SSGs add more friction cause I'd need to make sure the source is up to date on all machines I am trying to post. It is not a hard problem, but opening an editor online and posting is much easier. The key to blogging is reducing friction.

I just write HTML directly (and use GitHub pages)

Sometimes people just want to have fun

This. I'm still sitting on some almost core code that's written on an over enthusiastic teenagers idea of a plan.

You may want to benchmark lua versus luajit if you are writing scripts or other short-lived programs.

JIT-compiled languages aren't generally faster in starting up, they generally are used to speed up long-lived programs that have hot sections.

I tried it in the early days but couldn't get it to work on my mac. Also, I'm very familiar with Lua source code and LuaRocks so I chose comfort. Redbean is amazing though and I really want to take it for a spin some day.

For me, it isn't 100% language warts. It is the customer experience that matters the most for me. Can I compile and ship my products to my customers without having them to install a VMs, container runtime or a language runtime? That the question that is critical for me.

I love JS, don't get me wrong, I absolutelly love Javascript. But I love the JS that the browser runs and understands. I hate the current ecosystem of bundlers, transpilers, typescript, npm modules and so on.

Yes, I could have picked a js runtime and done the same thing. The same thing could also have been done with literally any other language.

It is less of a "Only Lua Can Do This" situation and more of a "I Like Working with Lua" situation.

Why not Fennel?

XSLT might be removed from the HTML spec soon, see discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952185

XSL is neat, and it is a functional language, but between XSL and XPath, it is quite verbose. Here's a small section of XSL I use to generate my website (not my blog):

    <xsl:choose>
    
      <!-- ... other code -->
      
      <xsl:when test="name(.) = 'subsection'">
        <xsl:choose>
          <xsl:when test="not(boolean(ancestor-or-self::*/@next)) or ancestor-or-self::*/@next != 'rev'">
            <xsl:if test="boolean(following-sibling::subsection[@listindex != 'no']/attribute::directory)">
              <link rel="next"  href="../{following-sibling::subsection[@listindex != 'no']/attribute::directory}" title="{following-sibling::subsection[@listindex != 'no']/child::title}"/>
            </xsl:if>
            <xsl:if test="boolean(preceding-sibling::subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/attribute::directory)">
              <link rel="prev"  href="../{preceding-sibling::subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/attribute::directory}" title="{preceding-sibling::subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/child::title}"/>
            </xsl:if>
            <link rel="first" href="../{../subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/@directory}" title="{../subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/title}"/>
            <link rel="last"  href="../{../subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=last()]/@directory}" title="{../subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=last()]/title}"/>
          </xsl:when>
   
          <xsl:otherwise>
            <xsl:if test="boolean(preceding-sibling::subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/attribute::directory)">
              <link rel="next" href="../{preceding-sibling::subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/attribute::directory}" title="{preceding-sibling::subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/child::title}"/>
            </xsl:if>
            <xsl:if test="boolean(following-sibling::subsection[@listindex != 'no']/attribute::directory)">
              <link rel="prev" href="../{following-sibling::subsection[@listindex != 'no']/attribute::directory}" title="{following-sibling::subsection[@listindex != 'no']/child::title}"/>
            </xsl:if>
            <link rel="first" href="../{../subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=last()]/@directory}" title="{../subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=last()]/title}"/>
            <link rel="last"  href="../{../subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/@directory}" title="{../subsection[@listindex != 'no'][position()=1]/title}"/>
          </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
      </xsl:when>

      <!-- ... other code ... -->
    </xsl:choose>

And yes, there is other code I've omitted for brevity. This is used to generate the navigation links for the site. I initially write this ... prior to 2009 (that's when I moved it into git). There have been some minor fixes to the XSL over the years, but it's largely unchanged (for a reason that I hope is obvious). Yes, I still use it, because it still works, and it's for a static website.

That’s obviously not true.

Why stay on the upgrade treadmill? For such a minimal language, are the updates really that compelling?

NeoVim is committing to 5.1 and leaving it at that.

Why couldn't LuaJIT support both? Feels like a needless limitation imposed on all its users. I noticed this problem when making plugins for neovim.

Be aware that Lua doesn't use semver and that versions take many years to be ready. In this page:

https://www.lua.org/versions.html

You can see that between 5.3 and 5.4 there were five years. 5.2 to 5.3 was also a five years gap.

Breaking changes are well documented and we see them years before they happen and nothing requires you to upgrade.

Most code runs on 5.1 forward.

You'd get used to it eventually. Many of us had to go the other way. I grew up with BASIC and Wirth languages (Pascal, Modula-2, etc) that were 1-indexed and to this day even after 25, 30 years of working professionally in 0-based indexed languages I still catch myself here and there having to adjust (and whiteboard coding can sometimes throw me off under pressure), but clearly operate just fine.

I worked briefly professionally in Julia a couple years ago, which is 1-indexed, and I found it an easy transition, really. Many scientific computing things are 1-indexed, as Fortran was, too, among other reasons.

My own project is a rewrite / defibrilation of the 1990s LambdaMOO server (https://codeberg.org/timbran/moor/), which had its own OO programming language that was 1-indexed.

It's just not as "weird" as people think, I think it's just a generation of people grew up with C-derived languages and have grown to expect 0 as "normal" when it's really just "accident of history/popularity". I don't think it's objectionable that Lua chose 1-indexing, it is actually more "friendly" to newcomers to programming.

You very seldon need to deal with it, most of your iterators are `pairs()` or `ipairs()` anyway. I like 1-based indexing and can deal with 0-based ones without any wart. I don't really get it why people make so much fuss, but then again if you feel it is a big problem, then there are plenty of other options that will suit you better.

thank you! Go is such a nice language (but then again, I love Pascal so Go feels quite familiar).

The reason it has an engine is because it also has an interface for me to post and admin stuff. The previous version was generated by scripts (using Racket and not Pandoc) and that made it harder for me to post from devices that were not my own main computer where the source lived. For example, I like posting from my phone.

PS: I'm the author.

If you want to do inter-page linking and some forms of templating, pandoc can be a complete pain, though.

I am extremelly biased against LLMs so take my opinion with a grain of salt. I opted to run a CGI script instead of spinning my own webserver cause webservers are tricky. I'd rather run something like nginx or caddy. I like nodejs (my preferred JS engine will always be Mozilla's and for the terminal I been favouring Bun) but part of using Lua on my own blog is cause of JS fatigue. I'm exhausted with the JS workflow these days.

Having run Lua on a GameBoy Advance, not that fiddly. At worst, compile it all yourself.