Re: Why nobody talks about Lua

[Alexander Gladysh <agladysh@...>]

>> I agree with you that lots of people use Lua, but I disagree that many
>> people talk about it.

>> I know it is silly to compare, but if we look at reddit.com
>> <http://reddit.com> as just 1 example.

>> www.reddit.com/r/python <http://www.reddit.com/r/python> has 11,424
>> readers, after 2 years

>> www.reddit.com/r/ruby <http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby> has 4,350 readers,
>> after 2 years

>> www.reddit.com/r/javascript <http://www.reddit.com/r/javascript> has 5,423
>> readers, after 2 years

>> www.reddit.com/r/lua <http://www.reddit.com/r/lua> has 263 readers, after
>> 1 year

> Well, Io has 78 readers and Tcl has 150.  Lua is doing better than that.  I
> suspect most people who are interested in Lua follow the mailing list. I
> follow reddit/r/lua, but I rarely see anything I haven't already read here.

> Maybe this is just an unrealistic metric to judge the success of Lua. It
> just does what it was designed to do well.

One also can compare the number of questions on StackOverflow on, say,
Lua (322) and Python tags (18,376)... (Perhaps Lua is so easy that no
one needs to ask the questions?)

If someone wants more realistic (or science-like) metric, TIOBE index could do:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Lua is on 21-st place. (Indeed, TIOBE index is arguable, but is better
than measuring Reddit subscribers.)

That being said, I, personally, do not understand the question either.
People do not talk about Lua, they just use it.

I see two reasons to raise a hype about the language:

1. To be able to point management to that hype, so you're allowed to
use the technology. This issue is alleviated for me by my previous
successful projects using Lua. Also, anyone may point to WoW and
Lightroom and say: "See, *they* do this too".

2. To get better opensource libraries and other infrastructure. Lua
opensource infrastructure got better over the years, but, in my
opinion, it is still in a rather sad shape. I think that this,
however, is more of a chicken and egg problem...

Alexander.