Re: A rant about Lua

[Fabien <fleutot+lua@...>]

On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 11:57 AM, PhiLho <PhiLho@gmx.net> wrote:

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.

I love to have a stable, conservative base upon which I can build hippie extensions. I appreciate that Lua has very few design warts, so that I can put my own over it, and it can only happen in  closed development process.

And by the way, rather than "closed development process", it would better be called "one-way development process": the Lua team certainly watches what's done by the community, and isn't shy to integrate good mature ideas in the language. What the community isn't involved in are the decision process, and actual implementation (the latter really being a detail).

We're all free to design our own dialects of Lua, and complaints about the development process generally are variants of "they wouldn't put the precious Official Lua Seal of Approval on my hack". Let's be consistent: being part of the official Lua distro is valuable because it only happens after extreme precautions have been taken. If you want a language whose acceptation process is more relaxed, feel free to go and join the Perl 6 effort :)