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txutxu | 1 year ago

I often read this, and I'm not sure I agree always. From the final user point of view, sure, give me a known language and don't make me learn a new config format for each program. 100% Agree.

But, now, let's go with examples from another view point:

Let's say there are different levels of support teams in an infra, and you (root) make a custom tool, so other teams can run something (and only that thing).

And that thing, has a config file. I don't want to give sudo to lua, I want to give sudo only to my tool.

It's like if we say "Don't provide the final user with a User Interface, just let them connect to the database as admin so they can do everything by themselves"

In this case, doesn't apply (sudo tmux == sudo bash).

Or another point of view:

tmux is 981K on my system, adding... lua? for the config, could increase it's size by maybe at least 30%? It's not the same to add an scripting lang to a 230GB game, than to every little tool.

Depending on context, an scripting language is ok. However, not always as a rule of thumb.

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gumby|1 year ago

If you’re going to make this jump from YAML to something with a little control constructs, your users will thank you if you go straight to a 3Lisp with full metasyntactic capability.

It’s the most user friendly thing you could do.

nmz|1 year ago

> It's like if we say "Don't provide the final user with a User Interface, just let them connect to the database as admin so they can do everything by themselves"

There's a big big difference to the user here, people who use tmux are power users.

> And that thing, has a config file. I don't want to give sudo to lua, I want to give sudo only to my tool.

Understandable, but tmux itself has run, which forks to /bin/sh, so what's your pick? /bin/sh and everything that entails? or a scripting language with built-in sandboxing?

> tmux is 981K on my system, adding... lua? for the config, could increase it's size by maybe at least 30%? It's not the same to add an scripting lang to a 230GB game, than to every little tool.

Binary size wise, sure, its an increase, but the resulting binary size would still be less than a hello world static binary written in go.

Also, there are more scripting languages than lua, there's jimtcl, guile and a couple of obscure ones.