A Love Letter to Lua Tables

Have you ever seen a work of art so elegant it made you cry? Have you ever regarded extreme simplicity with the utmost respect? If so, you know exactly how I feel. In recent months I have been more attentative to language details. This doesn’t only mean syntax, but general handling and developer experience. When I say I have never met a more immaculate language construction than the Lua table, I speak the sincerest truth. If you have used Lua tables but don’t see the magic, or haven’t used them and want in on it, I’m here to tell you everything you need to know to love high programming art.

┬──┬ (table)

I don’t intend to explain the table at a basic level since that has been done, and I don’t intend for this to be a tutorial. If you don’t know how the Lua table works, you can look here. Let’s take a look at this lovely invention table first, I promise it’s love at first sight. Here it is: {}. I KNOW, absolutely stunning. Since they are associative arrays, Lua allows you to index a table with any other type in the language. This goes beyond the classing integer or string to include decimals, booleans, functions, and even other tables. Some of you may have turned your heads at the end, I did too, and to be honest I still don’t know why I would index a table with either. When indexing with tables or functions, the table is actually indexed with the pointer associated with the index.

Jack of all trades, master of all trades

The beauty of tables lies in their environment. The table is the only data structure present in Lua (unless you consider functions collections). This means that the table has to pick up a lot of slack and be good at wearing several hats. Luckily, the table’s hat collection is quite expansive: arrays, hash maps, stacks, queues, linked lists, trees, graphs, classes, vectors, and so many more.

Another great reason to love tables is they are largely the reason for Lua’s impressively shallow learning curve. You only need to learn the syntax for tables in order to understand nearly all of the language! Not only is there only one language feature to learn, but it’s all that Lua gives you. There’s no large standard library to memorize, thick documentation to reference, or analysis paralysis when choosing a data structure. The Lua page itself describes the language as “provid(ing) meta-mechanisms for implementing features, instead of providing a host of features directly”.

Yeah. And what?

Let’s take a step back to appreciate what Lua has done here. The developers have created a successful and embeddable programming language powering entire game engines, modding environments, text editors, and Wayland compositors. At the center of all of these projects is the humble table, unassuming containing with unprecedented power. It is not to be scoffed at, rather hailed for being a radiant example of good and approachable language design. By now you should understand what makes tables great. If you don’t, I encourage you to spend some time with one. Get to know it, and know it well. If you show the table appreciation, it will make your time worth every second, repaying you many times over. To conclude, a haiku.

{ title = “beauty incarnate” } - Harrison DiAmbrosio

elegant in form

index to a heart’s content

raise to high regard