Re: Ruby philosophy vs Lua philosophy

[Steve Litt <slitt@...>]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2013 08:31:22 -0600
Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@trms.com> wrote:

> 
> I love the Stackexchange post that someone wrote (I wish I could find
> and attribute), regarding the use of Lua for web development. It went
> along the lines of:
> 
> If you are the kind of guy who likes to be productive quickly and
> early and don't need to understand everything about what you are doing
> or what is happening; use Ruby or Python. You risk complecting things
> [1], however. If you're the kind of person who likes to understand the
> entire language and everything about what is going on, then use Lua.
> The language is small enough to fit in your head, but composable
> enough to give you the needed power. 

QFT! The preceding paragraph gets right to the point. This is why I
think Lua is the best language on earth.

> It lacks a huge number of
> libraries, but most likely has what you need.

I disagree with this. As a matter of fact, if libraries weren't a
necessity, I'd be using Lua as my daily driver instead of Python. When
you need to do SNMP or quick-dev a GUI or web app, or parse XML or
YAML, it's nice to have Python's community tested and approved tools so
you don't have to code arcane stuff you don't know about. Sure, Lua has
a lot of tools, but from what I've heard and seen, they're in various
stages of development, and a standard Lua installation doesn't contain
them, which makes deployment tougher.

One other spectacular thing about Lua is its Table-Centricity. It's
just soooooo nice to know that no matter what kind of a weird data
type you're going to make, or even a weird "class" or "object", it's
going to be tables and metatables. No more "hmmm, let me remember, do
you use square brackets with arrays and curly braces with lists, or is
it the other way around? 

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance