Re: Standard for Lua

[Bret Victor <bret@...>]

Maurí­cio <briqueabraque <at> yahoo.com> writes:

> Do you guys think it would be possible
> to have something like an ECMALua (like
> ECMAScript)? Maybe with an available
> standard it would be easier to have Lua
> in many applications.

One of Lua greatest strengths is that it's embeddable.  When I
deliver you an application, I don't have to worry about whether you
have a certain web browser, or a certain version of Perl installed.
I simply ship the Lua interpreter with the app.  This obviates the
need for a standard user platform, assuming I can ship a binary or
C source.

The problem with the web isn't that it uses JavaScript instead of  Lua.
Core JavaScript actually isn't much different than a meta-less Lua. 
(Both are basically Scheme + Self.)  The problem lies with the complex
and poorly-designed frameworks that surround the core language
(ie, the standard objects, the DOM, CSS), and in particular, the
programmer's helpless dependence on whatever implementation of
these the user happens to have.

It is impossible to implement a complex specification exactly.
Thus, multiple decentralized implementations of a complex specification
will be incorrect in different ways.  A platform consisting of the
union of all possible implementations is therefore arbitrarily
unreliable.

Swapping EMCAlua for EMCAscript would just give a new syntax to the
same old problems.  Why would browser-makers implement EMCAlua's
frameworks any more consistently than JavaScript's?  What's needed
is a low-level, dead-simple platform on the user's end, one so
utterly simple that it actually can be implemented uniformly, and
a way for programmers to ship their high-level platform along with
the app.  (Which is exactly the situation when I deliver you my Lua
app as C source.)

On a different note.... whenever people talk about the need to make
Lua mainstream, I think about the roundtable at Workshop '05, when
Roberto sagaciously questioned whether popularity was even desirable.
If the Lua userbase were to explode a hundredfold, would that help
the development of the language?  Would it help the community?  Or
would it actually create the awful mess that JavaScript represents today?

-Bret