<story><title>MoonScript - A programmer friendly language that compiles to Lua.</title><url>http://moonscript.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>In all honesty, what&apos;s the point of this? I understand the point of compiling to JavaScript simply because that&apos;s the only language that runs on the most ubiquitous platform in the world. Why compile to any other high-level language?&lt;p&gt;Are there so many similar places where users are forced to use Lua, to warrant an extra layer? (with all the complexities such as debugging, a compile step, tracing errors back to MoonScript code, etc)&lt;p&gt;Note, I&apos;m not commenting about the language&apos;s choices. Maybe coding in MoonScript rocks big time. I just don&apos;t get why it compiles to Lua.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>leafo</author><text>I can understand your doubt. After writing a decent amount of Lua I really started to notice it lacking succinct ways to express things that I&apos;ve become used to in other languages.&lt;p&gt;So I wrote the language for myself to use, but I&apos;ve opened it up for other people because I think there is some potential for it. The use case for MoonScript is the same as the use case for Lua.&lt;p&gt;Also I have done a lot of mitigate the pains of compiling and debugging. It&apos;s actually pretty seamless, I&apos;ve done stuff like automatic code compilation on require, and error line number rewriting. I urge you to check out the documentation: &amp;#60;&lt;a href=&quot;http://moonscript.org/reference/#moonscript_api&amp;#62&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://moonscript.org/reference/#moonscript_api&amp;#62&lt;/a&gt;;</text></comment>
<story><title>MoonScript - A programmer friendly language that compiles to Lua.</title><url>http://moonscript.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>In all honesty, what&apos;s the point of this? I understand the point of compiling to JavaScript simply because that&apos;s the only language that runs on the most ubiquitous platform in the world. Why compile to any other high-level language?&lt;p&gt;Are there so many similar places where users are forced to use Lua, to warrant an extra layer? (with all the complexities such as debugging, a compile step, tracing errors back to MoonScript code, etc)&lt;p&gt;Note, I&apos;m not commenting about the language&apos;s choices. Maybe coding in MoonScript rocks big time. I just don&apos;t get why it compiles to Lua.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>silentbicycle</author><text>It&apos;d make more sense to me if it were compiling a very different &lt;i&gt;kind&lt;/i&gt; of language, such as a Constraint/Logic programming language. I really like Lua for scripting, as-is.&lt;p&gt;Lua&apos;s portability &amp;#38; smooth C integration make it an interesting code generation target (not to mention LuaJIT&apos;s performance). And however you feel about working in Lua, its code is straightforward to generate - the syntax is refreshingly free of odd corner cases.</text></comment>