Re: Panda Bears will die, Sloths will live on

[Jim Whitehead II <jnwhiteh@...>]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 5:01 PM, Patrick Mc(avery
<patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org> wrote:
> Lua started off as a small simple language to help oil workers. I am
> assuming these people don't know anything about closure or curries or
> anonymous functions and whatnot but they do know geology. If this language
> is being pushed solely by, and for academic types, working people like me,
> who use it as a tool to actually get a physical task done, will become more
> and more alienated.
>
> As computers get faster and faster and memory becomes almost irrelevant,
> management might just say, "screw it, embed Python, the geologists can't
> understand Lua"

You seem to be taking your personal experiences with Lua and applying
them as a broad generalization of 'non-programmers'. Finding out how
people learn and the easiest way for a demographic to do something is
a very difficult problem, even for an accomplished social scientist.
I'm not sure that anyone's limited anecdotes are a sufficient reason
for the Lua programming language to change.

90% of the time when someone makes a suggestion like this, one of the
first 10 posts includes a snippet of code that does exactly what the
person wants. 87% of the time (statistics are made up) the person
doesn't want another snippet of code to do that, doesn't want
preprocessing, doesn't want a macro filter, they just want it to be in
the Lua programming language.

Yes, Lua start off as a data description language. Lua continues to be
one of the simplest and more concise languages that I know of that is
still powerful and descriptive. Not adopting your suggestion doesn't
change that.

And yes, I agree, everyone seems to need to calm down.

- Jim