Re: Lua Foundation?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 6:37 PM, Andrew Starks <andrew@starksfam.org> wrote:
> layers: some kind of foundation uses whatever the authors of Lua
> publish as the language that is the basis for an ecosystem, which
> includes everything needed to build software systems and applications
> with Lua and a host of curated libraries in the middle.

It would be nice, but does it need organization? As Dirk says, any
person with strong opinions and some reputation can post a set of
recommendations. No blessing required! (It's not a bad idea actually,
but who is going to bell the cat?)

Part of the problem is the concept of 'nice'.  We have had some very
heated discussions on lua-l, but *no-one* criticizes another's work.
That's just not done, and that's cool. We value niceness.
With a plethora of solutions, a kind of natural selection happens, but
the painful process of discovery (as Dirk has gone through) is not
sufficiently public. We need to learn from others' experience more.
Look, *every* software ecosystem has this problem - there are nearly
9,000 'crates' for Rust, and finding your particular needle in that
haystack isn't easy (even though actually using crates is a pleasure).
So the 'discoverability' word comes up often. It works like this: you
hang around with the people from a community, listen to their chatter,
and find what's the canonical way of doing things. This is not
particularly efficient, although very social.

As for quality - oy, where to start? Documentation is an issue dear to
me, but even if the standard toolkit provides easy doc solutions (as
it is with Go or Rust) where you just have to throw some comments
before your functions, then people will not take the hint. But as lhf
says, documentation is hard, it isn't just about the tools.  Most
module authors would far rather write code than documentation -
open-source software is about maximizing fun, not work. (If something
is fun, it is not work)

We actually had a sweet spot with Lua for Windows, but it had a big
problem: it was hand-curated, not build-from-scratch. Peter Drahos'
LuaDist tackled that problem in an ambitious way, and provides
'Batteries'.  Which could become the base distribution, with LuaRocks
for the rest, but (as Andrew and Ryan) know, it's a lot of work.

So, the solution is not more structure, nor blessings from high - it
comes from the community, which is to say, the efforts of those who
think it is worthwhile.

steve d.