Re: S.W.O.T analysis

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 1:54 PM, Patrick Mc(avery
<patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org> wrote:
> If Python runs something in 200ms and Lua runs it in 50ms I don't care, it's
> still a blink of an eye.

Ah, but many of us work with dinky little processors, and even now
that smartphones are more powerful than 70s mainframes, you still have
the iron law that inefficiency is costly in power use.  Battery
evolution has been fantastic, but there are limits.

> Python is so much easier to learn then Lua

Not sure how generally true that is. If we took some young noobs and
gave them a feature-rich Lua environment, then I think there's less
gotchas than in Python, which has so many types and special syntax to
handle them.  ('feature-rich' is however the catch!)

> I think there is a real danger of ignoring the non-programmer(are modules
> simple to them? and how many geologists understand weak tables?)

Well, the set of 'languages friendly to non-programmers' certainly
does not contain Haskell ;)  (Though some pure mathematicians might
take it to it readily)

Also, no _consumer_ of a library should need to know about weak
tables.  That should all happen in the backroom somewhere.

steve d.