Re: Positioning a new lua distribution

["Martin Spernau" <martin@...>]

From: "Bilyk, Alex" <ABilyk@maxis.com>
> 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.

Well, for me this whoöe discussion is getting a little 'religious'...
I don't have _any_ problem admitting that I'm driving the LuaCheia project
along for the entertainment and more importantly the _learning_ experience
it gives me.

> 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.

Maybe this whole 'positioning' thing is wrong.
I have very personal and selfisch reasons to wnat a thing like LuaCheia.
Other people on the project might hsve (very) different reasons for wanting
to do it.

Maybe one could summarize the LuaCheia goal better by saying: 'We are trying
to fit some holes the various project members have' and would do it far
better justice that saying ' we want to replace Python/xyz' (which I never
wanted)

Szabolcs Szasz has in this thread already named some very good goals someone
might have for such a project.

LuaCheia might be better described as the experiment to building a
comprehensive collections off modules and most of all a well established
structure of binding them together to make such solutions possible.

Comprehensive but Modular. Thats whant the 'big' ones allways lacked for me.
There is always a rathzer large 'core' that needs to be present to run any
kind of Perl/Python application.
My goal for LuaCheia is NOT to supply a 'one-size-fits-all' distribution
that can do anything out of the box. But rather to have a 'mix and match'
collection of extensions (agreed others have that nicely) AND a very
light-weight core (here Lua shines!)

Another poinzt that came up in this discussion was Lua's benefit of the more
'open' licence. And yes, that is also a very important reason for me.

> 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?

Believe me, I considered the alternative before commiting my time to Lua ;)
REBOL came close to my requirements, but the commercial nature shyed me away
for good (ok it's free for any use, but only in binary form)

And SIZE does matter to me, even if I never use floppies these days. But I'd
rather download 300kb Flash-player than 14mb Sun Java RTE to run some
applications in my browser...

-Martin