Brazilian programming language created for Petrobras is a world fever

On screen, a grandmother with long gray hair, denim shorts and a walker welcomes her two granddaughters home. She is a cranky, unconventional lady who dances It’s Tchan in the living room, drives a trailer and takes the kids to the club. The video, filled with sound effects reminiscent of late-night television shows, has more than 1.4 million views on YouTube.

The play was made on an online gaming platform called Roblox, an entertainment and market phenomenon. In 2021, it starred in one of the biggest stock market debuts of the year, when it was valued at US$ 45 billion (R$ 225.6 billion). The games of the company founded by a Canadian and an American are especially famous among children and, in some way, they intersect with Petrobras and PUC-Rio.

Part of the platform is made in Lua, the most successful programming language developed outside the global north. It was created at the Tecgraf computer graphics institute, at the University of Rio de Janeiro, by researchers Roberto Ierusalimschy, Waldemar Celes and Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo. Its first version is from 1993.

At the time, they were developing a program for Petrobras to profile oil wells, which was successful. “One of the applications was used for more than ten years”, remembers Roberto. Part of its success is related to one characteristic: being easy to understand for the end user.

“The idea is that people can solve their problems on their own and do not need to contact programmers, ask for a solution and wait two weeks for an answer”, explains the researcher.

In a comparison, it is as if Lua is closer to the user, while C, for example, a complex language created in 1972, is closer to the hardware. Even when placed alongside the Python language, known for its simplicity, Lua stands out. The Brazilian has 21 keywords — those reserved to form the commands in the code —, while Python has 33.

These characteristics limit its performance, but make it the ideal alternative for those who want autonomy, which is the objective of the researchers. Until today, there are products made with the Moon for Petrobras, but not only for it.

Angry Birds, the birds versus pigs game that was a fever on cell phones at the beginning of the last decade, also uses Lua, as well as the famous strategy game World of Warcraft. Even NASA has used it.

“Being light, portable and easy to integrate with other languages ​​was our intention from the beginning. Now, that this would be exactly what the gamers needed was to aim for one thing and hit another. They discovered us”, says Roberto .

Roblox is one of the most famous examples today. According to data from the company’s balance sheet from the end of last year, there were 45.5 million active users per day in 2021 – a 40% increase compared to 2020. They spent 41.4 billion hours on the platform, which resulted in revenue of almost US$ 1.9 billion (R$ 9.5 billion).

Nicolly Martins Ferreira, 12, is responsible for some of these hours. She and her cousins ​​are responsible for the video with more than one million views described at the beginning of the text.

Roblox games were the first more elaborate games she had contact with—previously, she spent time with Pou, a virtual pet updated for the internet age.

Still, it was little complex for his father. “When she started playing Roblox, I even joked: ‘Nick, for God’s sake, if you want to play on my PlayStation 3 over there, you can play,'” says Leonardo in a video call with his daughter. “I thought it was a very strange little game, little square.”

He refers to the game’s designs, which can be called rudimentary when compared to the realistic graphics of current games. The trees are square and, to get into a car, for example, the doors are not opened – the avatar simply passes through what would be the bodywork, like a ghost.

Nicolly, or Nick, as stated on his YouTube channel of 460,000 subscribers, doesn’t care. “It doesn’t weigh that much and you can play it on your cell phone,” she says, sitting in a pink gaming chair and wearing a pair of headphones in the same color, decorated with cat ears.

For her, the game of the moment on the platform is Brookhaven, which simulates the life of a character and is similar to The Sims. “You have to work, take a shower, pay the bill,” she explains. “It’s like real life, if you don’t work, you don’t have money.”

It is possible to take pictures, store items in a backpack, play games on a tablet and drive, for example. You can also do amazing things, like pop bombs without destroying anything and create a pool in seconds, like she and her two cousins ​​did in the video.

Each of the three interpreted and controlled a character while the screen was recorded, with the right to variations in the tone of voice (more childlike for children and more mature for the grandmother). The game is an update of analog puppet games.

The platform was finalized in Lua to give freedom to users who want to create their own games or manipulate existing ones.

“There are a lot of people who use it to make something fly, for example,” says Nicolly. For now, she doesn’t venture into this universe, but learning the Moon is in her plans to perfect the game.

“Roblox teaches kids to program,” says Waldemar, one of the language’s creators. Who understood this was the Indian startup Byju’s Future School, which arrived in Brazil in the middle of last year. She teaches children and teenagers from 6 to 15 years old to program with the game platform.

“It’s great to know that 10- and 11-year-olds learn to program in Lua. It’s in that universe of their game, but they learn the essence of programming,” he says.

In addition to making the language palatable to children and beginners, the Moon’s simplicity is an asset to this world where there are tiny computers on our curtains, wrists, and refrigerators.

“We joke, but it’s real. It runs inside microwave ovens, TVs, printers, keyboards. There are commercial examples of all these products”, says Roberto.

Volvo Cars, for example, used the language for years on its on-board computer, a source of pride to the creators. “It is not research for research purposes, it is research transformed into a technological product used worldwide”, says Luiz Henrique.

In the internet of things, or iOT, the name given to the tendency to interconnect everyday objects, Lua has competitors — programmer Vinicius Zein, for example, expected the language to run more smoothly on low-capacity systems. He specializes in embedded systems and has used Lua to program on a corporate phone.

“I perceive a very large segmentation in this market. If it were for the Moon to occupy this place of protagonist, I think it should have already occupied”, says Vinicius.

The future, however, may be even more promising.

“Today I see Lua being used much more in games than in iOTs. But 10, 15 years from now, these kids will be professionals,” he says. “Maybe this will bring to market a very large pool of developers in Lua.”