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Benjamin Tolputt wrote:
On the whole, this mailing list is quite amenable to discussion on the language. Alot of it is ignored thereafter, but comments & criticism seem well received... just rarely acted upon. This is part of the whole "Lua development is closed to outsiders" mentality that both allows for quicker/cleaner release iterations and inhibits outsider contribution :)
Personally, I feel fine with this development way. I perceive Lua as being carefully designed, with changes that don't hesitate to break previous releases (on major versions) - since Lua is (often) embedded, if you don't like changes, stick with the version you have - but are well thought, discussed here, amended along some suggestions, etc. And compatibility among minor versions is carefully maintained.
Lot of suggestions here, like support of +=, are just no usable in the syntax of Lua and therefore are proved wrong by ML members. You can't "act upon" them if that mean integrating them to the language. Others are just cosmetic (replacing do ... end by { ... }) and mostly show people just can't switch among different syntaxes.
"quicker/cleaner release iterations"? Not sure that quicker releases would be cleaner... And do you mean current releases aren't clean?
"Outside contributions"? You can see lot of them on the Wiki... Lua code is small, can be built very quickly, so adding patches and tweaking your version isn't an issue. You can even keep the changes private if you wish.
Again, I like this controlled evolution, I wouldn't like to see Lua becoming PHP, with its large but inconsistent library (stripcslashes vs. strip_tags, etc.).
Lua isn't perfect, that's why we see regularly new releases. It isn't your average text editor, that's why there aren't 10 releases per year...