Re: Game company adoption and Lua was RE: Ironic comment RE: cooperative multitasking

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

> Yeah, the documentation is pretty abysmal.

I find this a bizarre criticism. The Lua manual is brief, clear and
comprehensive. The one thing it is not is a language tutorial (but that is
being addressed by Roberto's book). Personally, I had no problem learning
Lua from the manual; what is tricky is really getting to use the language
fully, but that's so in any language. I've learnt much more about C than I
could find in K&R & so on. Lua is perhaps slightly trickier because it's
so flexible, but then it is more adaptable. My style of simple object
orientation and heavy use of functional idioms works well for my project,
but probably wouldn't in other contexts. Lua, like Perl, doesn't force you
to program in a particular way.

I agree that the lack of stability of the language is a problem, but my
gut feeling is that Lua 4->Lua 5 is a bit like Perl 4->Perl 5: a major
update to an already good language after which things should cool
down rather. After all, look at the gap between Lua 3.2->4 and Lua 4->5.
The tendency is for the pace to slow down, not speed up.

Hence, once Lua 5 is out and the Lua book finished (whether or not it's
published is less of a problem if it can be downloaded), for me at least
Lua's documentation problem will be solved, certainly for the core
language.

-- 
http://www.mupsych.org/rrt/ | plagiarism, n.  the mind burgles