Re: From Lua to Python?

[Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@...>]

Hi Dirk,

On 13 July 2017 at 07:43, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2017-07-13 0:22 GMT+02:00 Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@majumdar.org.uk>:
>> I am reading the Python language reference and am completely
>> overwhelmed by the complexity - not of the language per se which seems
>> slightly more complex than Lua - but the meta mechanisms which are too
>> numerous for me to try and remember them all. Makes me appreciate
>> Lua's comparative simplicity - there is only one meta mechanism to
>> understand in Lua - the metatable.
>
> I've been reading this thread telling myself firmly that I will not
> give any opinion whatsoever, and I won't violate that resolution.
>
> However, history is not an opinion. I learnt Python in the mid-2000s,
> opened a little trapdoor marked "From Python to Lua" in November
> 2010, decided to go into that loft just to look around, and after a month
> discovered that the trapdoor would not open from the other side.
>

Sadly when you are developing products for customers they get to say
what they would like to use! Python appears to have become the de
facto standard scripting language in certain domains, just as Lua is
the language for games. If you were developing a game you would
probably not try to get people to use Python.

I am not sure what has propelled Python to this spot - perhaps the
adoption by Google several years ago. The number of Python libraries
available seems astonishing.

There have been several threads here on how to grow Lua. It would be
interesting to understand the driving factors behind Python's
popularity and maybe some of that can be adopted in Lua. I don't
really know but it seems to me:

a) Python has successful built a strong community of contributors. Of
course Lua being controlled exclusively by the Lua team has a
completely different model - there are no external contributors to
Lua.
b) For corporations to get involved they probably need to have some
degree of say in the project. Again the Lua model is not suited to
that. I understand that the reason Microsoft invented .Net and Google
invented Go was that they wanted control - but Java was not open to
sharing that. But Javascript and Python have adopted a more open model
(similar to Linux) which may be a key to their popularity.
c) I think also that the willingness to build a large echo system of
libraries that are blessed by the core team is beneficial.

Some of these things could perhaps be addressed, like (c) above, while
keeping the spirit of Lua - i.e. keep the core simple and uncluttered.

Regards
Dibyendu