RE: Positioning a new lua distribution

["Bilyk, Alex" <ABilyk@...>]

LuaCheia strikes me too as something that has been done over and over to the degree of being overdone... over and over. "Let's redo X in language Y" activities, referred to by one of previous posts, are simply a form of entertainment, IMHO. The only value I see in this effort is that new LuaCheia modules will carry same license as Lua, making them available for commercial software. Ah, sounded pretty selfish actually. Otherwise Perl and Python are on the shelf and already have 1000 times more of working off-the-shelf stuff (sql, sdl, xml, sockets, you-name-it) then LuaCheia has on its blueprints. I don't buy for a micro-second into an argument about fitting it on a 1.4M floppy. Floppies are obsolete, for one, and even less useful in the embedding world than say RS-232. Secondly, while 10 years ago just about any piece of software could fit on a floppy, today, a lot of things have trouble fitting on a CD. So, why look 10 years back? How about looking 10 years into the future when most people will unlikely know about C/C++. Assembly language is confined to a few specific domains now. C and C++ are about to meet the same fate as being too time consuming to work with for the vast majority of application domains already. Even performance-oriented applications switch to higher level programming languages more and more just like a while back people had switched from Assembly to C, etc., loosing in application performance but gaining in productivity in the process.

Embedding Lua in Python? What for? Python is virtually unsuitable for embedding in commercial applications AFAIK due to its scary license, as lawyers make us believe. If one wanted to run Python scripts from Lua why not to have something like os.exec("python", "my_test.py") returning a piece of Lua code generated by "my_test.py" ready for evaluation by Lua. Why would one want to run Lua from a Python script? Not that it would be hard to embed Lua in Python. Syntax between the two is similar. Semantics is similar. Clarity of sources produced is usually very comparable. Lua has no libraries to compete with Python/Perl. So why do we care about things like LuaCheia? I can think of one important reason. May it be simply because "Let's redo X in language Y" is fun and there are people who are entertained by doing it, including me on occasion? From my experience, however, such people usually have very hard time admitting that it's for entertainment value only, as if there was something wrong with having fun. Instead, they tend to say "Oh! But we would like to satisfy conditions A, B, C with our new thing Y, that no other language X can satisfy." And there you hear things like "fitting it all on 1.4M floppy" as a major goal and on and on and on. One can carry a CD around just as well. I think it is unfair to the entire entertainment industry to undervalue and downplay the fun aspect of things so much:) There is nothing wrong with writing software for entertainment! Certainly no more wrong than with watching TV, which most people do and have no trouble saying so:)

However, if the new LuaCheia modules have the same license as Lua itself, allowing them to be embedded into commercial applications as easily as Lua, than it becomes a totally different ball game and even more fun. Otherwise, I would have to say "Are you nuts? Spend a day, learning Python and forget you ever puzzled over programming just about anything one might want to program on a computer in a rather platform independent manner using very human-friendly modern-day computer language. Unless, of course, you feel like having some fun reinventing the wheel."

Another .02. 

Alex


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo [mailto:lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br]
> Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 4:48 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: Re: Positioning a new lua distribution
> 
> 
> >But could you maybe elaborate why you think one mght find it 
> usefull to
> >embed one scripting language into another?
> >Binding C-code can't be the real reason, Python bindings are 
> rather easy
> >too.
> 
> As someone already pointed out here, one reason might be to 
> use the huge
> amount of libraries that already exist for these other 
> scripting languages,
> Python being the prime example, I guess.
> 
> >Or are you thinking more along the lines of: 'Use this 
> extension with Perl,
> >or use it with Python, or even Ruby if you like, w/o 
> changing the code?'
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean here. Anyway, Lua is already 
> embedable in Ruby:
> 	http://ruby-lua.unolotiene.com/ruby-lua.whtm
> --lhf
>