Re: Lua's opportunity

[Jimmie Houchin <jhouchin@...>]

Gavin Kistner wrote:
> From: Jimmie Houchin
> [snip]
> > Am I wrong? What do the long time Lua users think?
> > What can we, the Lua community do to achieve a better
> > future for Lua? for programming?
> [snip]
>
> As I posted in another thread, my perspective 
> is that it is not (currently?)
> possible to have a best-for-all-cases swiss-army knife language.
> When I *need* absolute speed, I turn to C or C++.
> (Or rather, I turn to people who are used
> to programming in it to do it for me :)
> When I need good speed, software embedding,
> and a reasonably enjoyable language,
> I turn to Lua. When I don't need speed or embedding, I use Ruby.

Nobody's claimed Lua would be or needs to be a best for all cases 
language. But Lua can provide a better standard out of the box 
experience equivilent to Perl, Python or Ruby.

> For me, I prefer to switch to a higher-level language than Lua 
> (with a much richer set of core features, terser syntax,
> and all the libraries already available) when I have the chance.

I like Lua the language better than Python or Ruby the language(s). And 
as such I find it would be nice if that richer set of libraries either 
packaged together as a Lua distribution or bundled together for an easy 
download to add to my standard Lua install would be as nice to me and 
for me as you using Ruby when you can.

Ruby as a community (or individuals in such) profess beauty. I find Lua 
to be more beautiful to my eyes than Ruby. I am not seeking to convert 
Perl, Python, or Ruby users. What I think would be nice is that for 
those of us who like or prefer Lua the language, that Lua have a nice, 
comparable set of readily available libraries so that the need, desire 
or temptation to use one of the less preferred langauges (in the eyes of 
the Lua user) would be greatly reduced.

Jimmie