Re: Ruby philosophy vs Lua philosophy

[joao lobato <btnfdp.lobato@...>]

On 28/02/2013, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:56:36 -0500
> "D. Matt Placek" <atomicsuntan@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 3:46 PM, Petite Abeille
>> <petite.abeille@gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > On Feb 27, 2013, at 9:20 PM, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > >  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.
>> >
>> > Perhaps.
>> >
>> > On the other hand, if one needs  "SNMP, or quick-dev a GUI , or web
>> > app, or parse XML or
>> > YAML", then there are gazillions of battle tested, industrial
>> > strength,  C libraries at one's disposal.
>> >
>>
>> This is one of the greatest strengths of Lua, IMO; yes, ruby and perl
>> etc. have a larger base of ready-made packages, but try integrating
>> your own custom C++ class. Ouch!  Lua is so straightforward and
>> simple to integrate with C/C++ code that for most purposes, any C or
>> C++ library is ready to use with Lua.
>
> D Matt,
>
> I think you've put your finger directly on the pivot point of the whole
> discussion, and you've identified exactly where I failed to be
> explicit...
>
> I'm willing to bet there's not one person on this list who wouldn't say
> Lua is the best language for games, or at least the part of games that
> can be scripted. I'll bet nobody here would pick a language other than
> Lua to intermix with C or C++. Probably at least 90% of us would say
> Lua is the best core language.
>
> What I was trying to say, and I failed miserably, is that in an
> alternate universe, Lua *could* be the best language for everything. It
> could run the board. In this alternate universe, you need only two
> languages for any task involving telling a computer how to behave: Lua
> and C (and maybe C++ if that's your thing). In this alternate universe,
> Lua comes packaged with a wide variety of libraries, like Python does.
>
> Now please understand, in this alternate universe, the Lua language is
> exactly the same. Nothing about these libraries dilutes its ability to
> integrate with C or its table-centricity. No special syntax, semantics,
> or syntactic sugar is necessary. It's still the best higher level game
> dev language. The only change is this: In this alternate universe,
> there's absolutely no need for Perl, Python, Ruby, or PHP, because no
> matter what you're doing, Lua is the fastest and easiest way to do it.
>
> Back to our universe. You mentioned that any C or C++ library is ready
> to use with Lua. That depends on your definition of "ready to use". A
> lot of people, myself included, wouldn't call something ready to use if
> you need to manage your own stack and manage your own malloc and free.
> Doable? Yes. Better able to do it than Perl, Python and Ruby?
> Obviously. But ready to use? Almost by definition, no, because you
> have to use Lua's tools to build the interface.
>

I would like to have an automatic way to pack a core (5.1, 5.2,
LuaJIT2) with a configurable set of "batteries", for a given target
(windows, linux, ...).

I think that would serve both the uses cases of having a small
language to be embedded and a general-purpose language for
scripting/prototyping/systems programming.