Re: Breakthrough dream or Selenophobia

[Russell Haley <russ.haley@...>]

Sorry for the top post. (and most likely the wrong stream of this conversation). Some thoughts on this and prior posts:

Lua showing up on any top ten list is actually a compliment to its wide and varied usage. Hardly what I would call a niche language. I'm sure there are dozens of lanuage communities that would love to be a top ten dreaded language. Perhaps what is meant instead of niche is strength or feature?‎ Likewise, the diversity of variants is a testament to the utility and flexibility of the syntax. 

Lua as it stands (IMHO) is a beautiful, thoughtful piece of work and an amazing piece of technology when taken as a whole. ‎Not a single complaint is 'I can't do x' but simply 'I don't like how I have to do x'.  

I've found multiple threading libraries though I don't look for cross platform compatibility. Also, if one wants a nice IDE and ZeroBrane doesn't have enough features, there is a great add-in for JetBrains IDEA. 

It's always easier to criticize then invent. I am grateful for the ‎fantastic language given away with such a liberal license. The creators are teachers and to ask them to also give away the PIL is to ask them to give away their income.  The meager $30 investment towards the carreer of said complainants on SO would go a long way to alleviate the pains they may have. 

And finally I think the community has done a wonderful job filling in the functional gaps that have been intentionally left to keep the language small and portable. I would say to complainants if they were on my team, "Didn't find the library you like? Oh, well I thought you were a developer? All the sources are available including the LuaRocks website. STFU and fix it yourself. Otherwise don't let the door hit you on the way out." 

Russ

P.s. Counting from zero is stupid. Zero means the absence of units. To co-opt it to mean anything else is to intentionally skew it's meaning. :P

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Virgin Mobile network.

‎
  Original Message  
From: Frank Kastenholz
Sent: Sunday, March 26, 2017 7:51 AM
To: lua-l@lists.lua.org
Reply To: frank@kastenholz.org
Subject: Re: Breakthrough dream

On 3/25/17 3:54 PM, Egor Skriptunoff wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 25, 2017 at 10:26 PM, Dirk Laurie wrote:
>
> 2017-03-25 15:04 GMT+02:00 Rodrigo Azevedo:
>
> > Based on the thread 'Selenophobia', and your major experience, choose 5
> > characteristics you think indispensable to keep Lua advancing as a
> > "general-purpose script language";
> >
> > 1) an expanded basic library (some batteries), well organized, maintained
> > and documented. "Pure Lua" libraries at least.
> > 2) easy installation on major operating systems (with shared libraries)
> > 3) threads (pthreads!? not Lua's coroutine)
> > 4) optional type annotations (performance, error check etc)
> > 5) easy, transparent, way to port libraries to new versions of Lua.
> >
> > Is this possible to start, organize and support for a long period ( a
> > 'larger' community)?
>
> This does sound a bit like someone who wishes to enlarge the listening
> public of a radio station that broadcasts classical music, and comes
> with suggestions like:
>
> * breezy disc jockeys
> * short, snappy pieces instead of those interminable symphonies
> * phone-in discussion programmes
> * jazz is fine music too, isn't it?
>
>
> The analogy with classical music is very incorrect.
> All 5 characteristics being discussed here wouldbe useful for all Lua users.
> They are not contradictory to set of features we already have in the
> language.


These particular changes _could_ be problematic. The project I was on
developed an application environment, with apps coded in Lua, that runs
on a variety of platforms -- different processors and operating systems
and varying levels of resources. On some systems we had 250MHz
cpu speeds, <10MB RAM for our part of the system, and the OS was not
Windows or a flavor of Unix. Anything that would expand the footprint
of the core PUC-Rio Lua (larger libraries, type checking in the
compiler, etc) would be a problem. Similarly, anything that ties Lua
to a specific OS (or family) would be very bad.

That said,

1) What would be reasonable would be to make these sorts of
features truly optional, selectable by #defines in something
like "lua_features.h". I would not want to have to go through
all the source code unwinding things to pull out some features.

2) Despite what this list would like, Lua will never replace, or even
come close to equating, Python or sh or ... as scripting languages.
The others are too embedded in the world's mindset. Lua's
real strength is that it can easily be installed in some other
program, giving that program scripting/config/etc-ability. That is
its market niche. I would _strongly_ urge that the PUC-Rio folks
never risk losing that niche as the consider new functions/features
to add.

Frank Kastenholz