Re: Is "scripting" truly Lua's future?

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä <vtatila@...>]

Matt Campbell wrote:
> The following quote from the recently published Computerworld interview
> with Roberto caught my attention:
>
> Question:  Where do you envisage Lua's future lying?
> Answer:  Scripting. <snip> scripting language, as its
> name implies, is a language that is mainly used for scripting. The
> origins of the name are the shell languages that have been used to
> script other programs. Tcl enlarged it for scripting a program, but
> later people started applying the term for languages like Perl or
> Python, which are not scripting languages (in that original meaning) at
> all. <snip>
> [end of quote]

> My experience has been that given enough libraries, Lua is quite good as a
> primary implementation language.
> Perhaps Roberto is saying that Perl,
> Python, and the like are better in that role, so the best use of Lua is
> for scripting, the purpose for which Lua was originally developed.
Not sure what kind of answers you were after, but here's a scripter's view 
whose mostlyh been coding for the fun of it:

I'm looking at this coming from Perl, and have only done some apps on my own 
that are a couple of kloc of code at most. As to why Perl, it let's me 
prototype ideas so much quicker than the lower level languages, and has 
libraries for stuff I find important. Briefly libraries are the thing in 
Perl: COM, off-line and on-line MIDI handling, GUi automation, building 
accessible WIn32::GUIs, text processing, and so on. So first and for most: 
CPAN, the PPM command-line. and a keep it simple yet convenient coding 
culture that's markedly different from your average Java package -- you 
don't have to read 10 pages of docs and understand heavy OOP abstractions to 
get started. As to what I've done, I think my biggest Perl project is gotta 
be a Win32::GUI based, fully keyboard usable MIDI drum machine for the blind 
and other keyboard users, since I got fed up with not being able to use any 
of the soft drum machines out there:

http://vtatila.kapsi.fi/beats_me.html

As for Perl features helping you write large programs that would be absent 
from Lua, I don't think there is anything major. Both can easily do OOP and 
name spaces that I tend to use. I like Perl's POD documentation format, 
however, as well as good conventions of where the packages and docs go 
automagically. It is much quicker for me to look up Perl docs compared to 
any other language due to perldoc and the neat dir structure.

Another thing I find helpful is that Perl's strictness is compile-time so my 
variable typos. and I do these a lot coding with speech, are caught much 
earlier apart from method calls. Would be great to have such support for 
Lua, as a special build, add-on Lintlike program or some such thing. Other 
than that I don't complain. I tend to view Lua as a kind of minimalist, 
orthogonal Perl with the Unixisms ripped out and a change in philosophy. 
most of the core mechanisms allowing you to do the Perlisms if you want to 
are there, and even more. Cloning Ruby's arrays and related mixins would be 
a fun coding exercise in Lua OOP, <grin>.

It might even be that because Lua givse you less syntax, you write programs 
that are cleaner for new programmers to understand. I miss autovivification, 
hash slices, map and grep, push, regexp lookaround etc... But this is just 
minor quibbling and redundant convenience. While code not using it might be 
a bit more wordy, it does not require you to understand those concepts, and 
might be easier to maintain. I find that because perl has all these 
mechanisms at the language rather than library level, I tend to use them 
where it makes sense, often optimizing for brevity or elegance as opposed to 
coding for maintainability. Lua allows you to stay maintainable as it has 
fewer temptations. Still, I am, maybe as a result of Perl, a big fan of 
programmer convenience still as in  Ruby. I haven't done Python so cannot 
comment on it, though.

--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä
Accessibility, Apps and Coding plus Synths and Music:
http://vtatila.kapsi.fi