Re: Ruby philosophy vs Lua philosophy

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 2:46 PM, Petite Abeille
<petite.abeille@gmail.com> wrote:

> Now that the basics are covered out-of-the-box, and specifically tailored to one's needs and wants,  one can spend some quality time building what one really wants to build. Using Lua :)
>
>

That's kind of what I was getting at with my stolen quote.

Lua has everything that you need in order to do what you want. It
doesn't have everything that you want, which is for someone else to
have done most of the work for you.

That said, I have taken more unwanted "Makefile" classes, compiling
Lua Abandon-ware, than I care to mention. In one heartbreaking
example, I tried to make a Lua application to wire into our software,
which required a TCP/IP stack, a little web server and some JSON
parsing. I'm not very experienced, but my epic, two-day-long path to
failure came down to my inability to make what was working on my Mac,
work on the PC. A co-worker replicated my work in 2 hours using
node.js, probably working from binaries.

It's been a  while since that public failure and the wounds have
healed. Many of you are thinking, "What problem could he have possibly
had? Just [some explanation or series of steps which may seem simple
now, even to me, but at the time were out of reach]."

The point is this: accessibility in the realm of "general scripting
language to use on its own and not embed into a big project" lags
behind the rest of the eco-system. This is neither bad nor good, in my
mind. Other tools work, does Lua need to cover their ground, as well
as its own? Probably not.

But let's face it. On the day that Lua 5.2 was announced, there was no
standard TCP/IP library that worked on major computing, without
hacking the source or finding some random guy's github repository (is
this still the case???). That sucks. Hard.

For those that feel a connection with this community, or language, or
whatever one associates with their need to evangelize for the
language, we should be ashamed. Lua as a language is a garden
well-tended. The front yard has a rusted, bullet hole-ridden Camaro on
blocks, a busted toilet and a washer-machine.

If anyone cares to know what my prescription for fixing it is: a
bigger asshole leading the initiative. Someone up top has to care
about this and start ordering people around. Without this, it won't
happen and again, it doesn't have to, in order for Lua to be
considered a success, which it already is.

To be fair, it's not that useful to romanticize about other
open-source or community projects, almost all of which lack
documentation and have a ton of dead and half-done projects lying
around. It's just that basic stuff has to be there to be considered a
viable alternative in more generalized arenas.

Given Lua's embedded-first nature, it often is not.

Now... basic stuff.... What exactly is that?

With apologies to those that use this list for important matters,

--Andrew :)