While I enjoy Lua, clean, elegant, and entirely too reasonable, Tcl is undoubtedly the SQLite of programming languages.

https://www.tcl-lang.org/community/tcl2017/assets/talk93/Pap...

It's because Tcl, like SQLite, operates on a peculiar metaphysical principle: everything is a string until proven otherwise, and even then, it's probably still a string.

Also, D. Richard Happ, who we owe thanks for SQLite, was and perhaps still sits on the TCL Board (I may be wrong about that, but Happ holds significance in the TCL community).

In my mind:

Tcl is the quietly supportive roommate who keeps making coffee and feeding LISP-like functionality until the world finally notices its genius.

Lua sits across the table, sipping espresso with a faintly amused expression, wondering how everyone got so emotionally entangled with their configuration files.

nice LoL

Lua is the glue when sh/bash doesn't suffice.

Lua is simple and elegant, and I much prefer it to Tcl.

Lua is in games and in LuaTeX, and when you have the choice of embedding a LISP, a FORTH or Lua in a larger application, it is often the most maintainable, runtime-efficient and low-memory footprint option of all.

First time I've been called a bot I guess :-)

But no, I'm a real person, I just post things that I (randomly) find interesting

Go pokes!

I feel like the existence of LuaJIT made is seemed like standard Lua was slow, but that's far from the case.

LuaJIT is amazing. I find it insane there are no Schemes that are able to match it as a tiny, embeddable scripting language with a JITer. GNU Guile is an absolute gargantuan monster in comparison.

LuaJIT is in somewhat active development, with 40 commits so far this year, although these are mostly bug fixes (some for bugs introduced by LLVM). The main new feature, if you can call it that, is "suport for Apple hardened runtime."

Languages developed in that time matured just as good binary package managers started popping up, is my pet theory. Before that, getting a development environment for a new language was serious work, and people did things like stick to Perl since it happened to be installed already.

Don't forget Ruby in 1995!

True

I think that's an illusion.

The language of R is S, which originated at Bell Labs in 01976. Python began development in 01989, although Guido didn't release it until 01991. And the top 20 on https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ are Python, C (01972?), C++ (01982?), Java, C# (01999? though arguably it's just a dialect of Java), JS, Visual Basic (first released 01991, within your window), Golang (02007), Delphi (under this name in 01995 but a dialect of Object Pascal from 01986, in turn a dialect of Pascal, from 01970), SQL (01973), Fortran (01957), Perl (01987), R, PHP (01995, within your window!), assembly (01947), Rust (02006), MATLAB/Octave (01984), Scratch (! 02003), Ada (01978?), and Kotlin (02011).

By decade, that's one language from the 40s, one language from the 50s, no languages from the 60s, 5 languages from the 70s, 5 languages from the 80s, 4 languages from the 90s, 3 languages from 0200x, one language from the 02010s, and no languages from the 02020s.

I think most of what's going on here is that it takes a new language a long time to get good, and it takes a new good language a long time to get popular.

Lua is #33 on TIOBE's list, but given its prevalence in Roblox (as Luau), WoW, and other games, I suspect it should be much higher.

For some reason, CUDA (a dialect of C++) and shader languages like GLSL don't show up in the list at all.