Re: The Lua Development Process: Why Closed?

[James Graves <james.c.graves.jr@...>]

Rob Hoelz <rob@hoelz.ro> wrote:

> So, the question is (if you couldn't tell from the title): why did the
> authors of Lua decide to adopt a closed development process, and why
> does this continue to this day?  By "closed development process", I
> mean that unlike Perl, Python, Ruby, and other popular open source
> languages, the canonical implementation's development is done by an
> exclusive group, and the "work in progress" tree is not visible to the
> public.  I find this very interesting, especially considering how
> liberal Lua's license is.  I think it would be cool it other developers
> would be able to directly contribute to Lua's development, but maybe
> I haven't spent enough time thinking about this. =)

As an addendum to my previous comments, also consider that the rate of
Lua development is quite low compared to these other languages.

For good or for bad, 'Lua' itself is a small, tightly integrated
language, and the core distribution is not "batteries included".

A programming language that is already in widespread use does not
necessarily benefit from rapid development.  Either you introduce
breaking changes (which the Lua team does, but only once every few
years), or you don't introduce breaking changes.  And if you don't,
then you tend to end up with a lot of cruft and bad compromises when
new features of the language itself are added.  For example: Java,
C++, and many more languages than I'd care to name.

James