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On 26-Feb-16 19:03, Phil Leblanc wrote:
I just don't get it. Applications are used by users and modules are
used by developers. If a user wants to install an application on his
server or PC, he will look for a Windows installer, or a package for
his target linux distro, or even get a tarball, expand it in some
directory and run it from there.

An application_user_  is not going to care about the language(s) the
application is written in and go to some language-specific tool to
install it (how good the tool is).

I published a couple of OS-independent open source applications written in Lua. The average Windows user had trouble even setting up the interpreter. That's why I don't even try using libraries and resort to languages I like a lot less than Lua (e.g. Python) when I have to write something that normal users can just *use*.

Making Lua a popular choice as a generic application language would require a large, portable, 'official' standard library and an user-oriented, hassle-free package installation system (with no extra tools required). I am not sure this would be worth the cost: after all, Lua shines in the embedded language domain, while the "generic application language with tons of libraries" niche is already quite full.

--
  Enrico