Re: The source file culture

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

2009/9/8 steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com>:
> Both were not very coherent complaints, but that is the nature of a
> lament

No! Laments can be coherent and precise, and certainly should be in a
forum such as this. That was my principle criticism; I have nothing
against well-thought-out laments and complaints.

> Most of us are embedded Lua people, and
> have forgotten our frustrations with command-line tools, forgiven C,
> and often content to use 30-year old technology (e.g emacs/vi, make).
> From that perspective, not wanting to go that path seems like a sign
> of not being serious.  Then there are people who are attracted to a
> fast, sane little programming language and want to use it in wider
> applications, maybe even as an application library.  I'm in both
> camps, I like Lua because it reduces the amount of C++ I need write;
> the headaches I get with C++ are not related to my skill level, just a
> recognition that most C++ is probably premature optimization in the
> Knuth sense.

This looks like stereotyping to me. "Command-line tools, C, emacs and
make" have all evolved considerably in the last 30 years; equally,
there are other development environment styles which have come along
in that time. Using Visual Studio isn't "not being serious" any more
than using GNU is being stuck in the stone age. Worse, this sort of
dichotomy implies an unavoidable trade-off.

> There are initiatives to make Lua a better all-purpose scripting
> language, and mostly these don't worry the embedders, unless like
> Andre they think it is complicating that simple idylic C + Lua life.

This is more like it: it's only when one use is advanced at the
expense of another that there's a problem. What we need more of is the
sort of ingenuity that gets around these problems; far more often than
one might imagine, it's possible. The way that Emacs wraps batch tools
for interactive use, and the way that Visual Studio now exposes its
internals programmably are two obvious examples, as, more generally,
is the way that Mac OS X allows a far wider range of interactions
(both at the user and the API levels) than its predecessors.

> So maybe when a scripter complains, then the embedders should remember
> their own frustrations, just a little?

(I'm still a bit of both, as although I don't use Lua for writing new
scripts much, I still maintain old ones, and use it in certain
situations, like build systems for programs in which I already embed
Lua.)

> Otherwise, we do come across as elitist and snotty, and that does us
> no favours in the long term.

I'm not sure where the impression of elitism (which is to say,
exclusivity) is coming from. I've not seen anyone, at least in this
thread, who wouldn't like Lua to be easier to use for everyone.

Having fallen into the heffalump trap next to which I was trying to
erect a "BEWARE OF THE HEFFALUMP TRAP" sign, I shall now find
something more worthwhile to do.

-- 
http://rrt.sc3d.org
L’art des vers est de transformer en beautés les faiblesses (Aragon)