Re: Reasons for a Web Developer to use Lua?

[Chris Babcock <cbabcock@...>]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 12:30 PM, Tim Johnson <tim@johnsons-web.com> wrote:
> I've been a programmer for 24 years. I have a background (way back)
> in C and Assembler and about a dozen other languages. These days I
> do primarily web development using python. There might be a market
> for me for mobile devices.

If I was planning to do mobile development, I would probably be using
something like MoSync - http://www.mosync.com/

> I would welcome sincere comments on whether lua might be useful for
> me. I don't mean to troll for an argument or a language war, but
> just to see if there might be practical application for me to learn
> lua.

There have been some similar, but less focused, questions asked recently.

I think the most curious thing about Python MVC frameworks is the
object relational mapper. While it seems that large numbers of
programmers in the PHP, Ruby, Java and many other programming
communities are moving towards key-value stores, object oriented
databases and document stores - derationalizing data in order to
improve performance - Pylons and Django have continued with this ORM
anti-pattern of rationalizing data for storage whether it needs to be
queried relationally or not. If you happen to like the MVC pattern,
it's easy enough to use Versium and Saci for your model, Copas for
your controller and any number of template engines for your view. You
won't find anything that works out of the box for ecommerce or social
networks like Satchmo or Pinax on Lua, but then again you won't find
anything quite like Sputnik on Python, either.

If you lean more Twisted or Tornado then you'll want to look at
LuaGravity and Lanes. If I was going for radical scalability I'd mix
these two concurrency models, throw some heavy load testing at it and
see what happens to the C10K barrier. If you've ever wished that the
HTTP stack on Twisted didn't make those loud vacuum noises then you'll
want to take a look at Reactive Server Pages.

Lua may not have the obvious library support that Python does, but the
basics are there and the APIs tend to be pretty stable. Most of the
community software in Lua is MIT/X, which gives you more options with
your final product than GPL or LGPL licensed code. It's not trite,
either, to say that you can always bind a C library for a given task,
so (when that comes up) don't look at that idea through a lens of
what's involved generating Python bindings.

Chris
--
Yippee-ki-yay, coffee maker.