With dynamically typed languages I feel it's better to wait until you've tried to maintain the code for a while before you consider the languages effectiveness.

I had to maintain a very large Lua codebase that has been active for several years. One big problem with Lua was how it will happily take more or less parameters to functions and continue to execute compared to something like Python where it is an error to pass the wrong parameters. This meant when we update a function signature we would often incorrectly update call sites, etc.

I can't remember the specifics but we had a few issues with tables being both dictionaries and lists. IIRC, if you delete a list index and there are later list indices, they will turn into dictionary keys. We had a few bugs to do with not traversing the entire array portion of a Lua table because of this.

I also implemented a few classic algorithms, e.g. bisect in Lua and you have to be very careful with 1-based indices. You also have to be very careful when interfacing between C and Lua. I prefer 0-based indices and [start, stop) style ranges for everything nowadays.

I much prefer statically typed code during maintenance. But dynamically typed languages like Python or Typescript where you can bolt on types, later if you wish, are not too bad.

Also using named parameters as much as possible is great for maintenance.

I saw someone describe python as “stressful” for this reason and I couldn’t agree more. It’s difficult to have confidence in any change I make or review. I need to sit down and manually exercise codepaths because I don’t get the guarantees I crave from the language or tooling. While with the small amount of Rust code I’ve written lately I could yolo changes into production with no stress.

>This meant when we update a function signature we would often incorrectly update call sites, etc.

The same thing happened with our huge legacy PHP monolith, which was written before type hints were a thing. Developers were reluctant to refactor large chunks of code when the time came, because it was just too easy to introduce bugs - you couldn’t be confident about anything without manually digging through tons of code. So, when business requirements changed, they’d just bolt on some hacks to avoid touching the existing, tested code, and call it a day. It became a self-reinforcing loop: fear of refactoring → more hacks to avoid refactoring → more brittle code → even more fear of refactoring. Eventually, they added type hints and a linter to analyze them, but by that point you start to wonder - why are we even using a dynamic language and fighting its quirks?

> With dynamically typed languages I feel it's better to wait until you've tried to maintain the code for a while before you consider the languages effectiveness.

True for any language really. There's an entire category of blog posts: "I used language X for 2 weeks and here's my hot take". Okay, great. But what do you really know? For every language I've used for a serious amount of time I've changed opinion over time. Some things that seemed like neat ideas at the start turned out to be not so neat ideas down the line. Or things I considered pointless or even stupid at the start turned out to be very useful once I better understood the nuances and/or got used to working with it.

And of course it's double hard to judge will come back to haunt you a year down the line.

Even as an experienced programmer I find it hard to properly judge any of that from just a few weeks.

One of my coworkers described Python (specifically in reference to a niche framework, but I think it applies generally) as "a bucket of play-doh filled with broken glass"

I understand your frustrations since you are forced to work within a codebase that is shared with other developers with varying levels of experience. Lua was from the get-go never supposed to be a standalone language, it is more of a complimentary language and if you fail to respect that then it becomes unwieldy, quick. It is extremely easy to shoot yourself in the foot with the language and once bad design decisions creep in it is hurts a LOT. However once you get enough experience with the language you manage stay within the "happy path" (which is EXTREMELY difficult when you are on a team with salaried software engineers with different and often misaligned incentives) it is actually one of the best languages available.

One of the things I suspect your team is doing wrong is you are using the PUC Lua C API instead of the LuaJIT FFI. That is one of those things which just completely destroys the "happy path". The PUC Lua C api is effectively a deprecated feature at this point. A few years ago you could have made the argument that the PUC Lua C API is more portable than LuaJIT which is absolutely true. But q66's (from Chimera Linux fame) cffi-lua project nullifies that argument since you can now use the luajit-style FFI in PUC Lua, which works on every platform that libffi supports.

Again I understand your frustrations with the language since you are working within a fundamentally adversarial environment. Perverse incentives can easily destroy any good patterns you can establish since the language is so flexible. I implore you to explore the language outside of your day job.

Yeah I had a pretty high opinion of Lua when I first used it, then I came back to code I'd written years earlier, and the lack of types just made it a nightmare.

It really could use a fully statically typed layer that compiles down to Lua, and also fixes some of the stupid stuff such as 1 based indexing and lack of increment ops etc.

>when interfacing between C and Lua

Except for the indexing mismatch, I've found calling Lua from C and vise-verse very easy.

I think that much of game development is unlike a lot of other kinds of programming, where there's often more ad hoc game mechanic prototyping than maintenance. This is where dynamic programming excels. But of course, that consideration needs to be balanced against others.

you might like this one: https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep ... it sounds like you'd get some mileage out of it.

They mention Luau near the end, and my opinion is that Luau is a significant improvement. Mainly because of the optional typing, but the other features too are each small but impactful quality of life improvements.

> dynamically typed languages like Python or Typescript

You likely mean JavaScript. Typescript is very much statically typed, unless you allow everything to be `any` and `unknown`.

Typescript is mentioned in TFA as a desired (but not available) option, because of the great static typechecking support.