Re: A rant about Lua

[Florian Weimer <fw@...>]

* Fabien:

> 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).

I think this is rather due to Lua's small size.  Whether you can keep
a small size with an open development process is a different question.

As a rule of thumb, I avoid projects with closed development because
it means that there are only very few people familiar with the code
base.  It's also hard to figure out how to change things if you can't
use incremental changes for reference.  But due to Lua's compactness,
this isn't such a big problem.  Quite the contrary, my impression is
that the Lua community is always on the brink of multiple
incompatible, minor forks because the main development line invisible
most of the time.