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On 26/03/2019 02:21, Steve Litt wrote:

On Sat, 23 Mar 2019 10:11:26 +0100
Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@tiscali.it> wrote:


On 22/03/2019 16:25, Italo Maia wrote:

[snip]


One thing that I would like to know more is about is if there are
plans for the language growth and legacy. Big companies usually
have to prepare people to take over positions when they become
vacant by any reason (company needs more people for that task or
the person fall sick or retired).

Are there plans for Lua to have more core developers or a guidance
for new core developers? Like, "if you plan to become a developer
of the language, this should be your mindset and compromises".


[snip]



I had thought about that for a while, too.

I've always thought that the open-source/close-development model used
by Lua team has, together with many advantages (e.g. no
design-by-committee bloat), some serious drawbacks: what you are
talking about is one, IMO.


I like the non-Democratic way Lua development works. As you say, no
design by committee. In addition, not a week goes by when somebody
doesn't champion yet another change to the Lua language. And a whole
bunch of people agree. And the email thread goes on for days. And most
of these suggestions are edge case stuff easily accomplished with just
a few lines of the current Lua language. And Lua doesn't need syntactic
sugar: Nothing in Lua is particularly cumbersome.


[snip]


Fortunately, with the current non-democratic development paradigm,
those requesting features can go on for a week or so, have their
say, and nothing comes of it. Mainly because they didn't have enough
skin in the game to do most of the development themselves. They could
have made and distributed a patch, and if it were widely used perhaps
it would have ended up in the distribution. They could have developed a
Lua-only include file to fulfill the need, put it on their own website,
problem solved, and here again, if popular, it might become part of the
Lua curated libraries. They could have forked Lua. That's the ultimate
guarantee of freedom in Free Software, especially useful if the
project loses touch (which it hasn't).

In summary, 90%+ of those asking for enhancements aren't aware of the
cost of their request, so it's a good thing the developers don't scurry
to implement them.
As I said in my previous post, I acknowledge the advantages of Lua development model, but I pointed out one drawback (there is no perfect model).
Another one is what you speak of as an advantage: "90%+ of those asking for enhancements aren't aware of the cost of their request" Yep! right! And I think many won't do those requests if the development process were more open. Of course there would always be someone who would push for their idea despite its "impedance mismatch" with the current implementation/Lua team's view, but I think they could be a small minority.
A more open (in the sense of "the community knows what's going on") development process would allow people to understand more easily why a good idea taken in abstract term would not fit Lua effectively. 



The question was asked what to do when Roberto retires. Same thing as
any other Free Software project directed by a maintainer: He appoints a
competent successor, or else may the best fork win.
"He appoints a competent successor" Nope! That's just the problem I pointed out: from a legal POV, as far as I understand, all legal aspects of ownership of Lua are to be referred to PUC Rio, an institution of which Roberto is only (legally speaking - I'm not talking about reputation here!) an employee. 

So I don't think Roberto has /the legal right/ to appoint a successor.
Lab Lua resources are in the /legal/ hands of PUC (please someone correct me if I'm wrong). So if some extremely dumbass manager decides, when the highly reputable leader of the project retires and is "out of the way", to redirect the funds to some other project, Lua development could be in trouble.
I repeat myself, sorry, I've already seen that: perfectly good projects, with good teams, were scrapped by management as soon as the project leader left!
The reasons could be plain stupidity, ignorance, shortsightedness, greed (fund redistribution among other pet projects) or even political or personal too! I've seen my share of "professional jealousy" in the past, and that's one of the reasons why I don't work in academia any longer.
Anyway that sort of things sadly happens. Lua, from a legal perspective, is not a project /owned/ by Roberto or anyone in Lua team (as far as I know).
So if there would be a conflict between Roberto when he retires and PUC management, the only thing Roberto could do is to fork Lua and name the project differently (because also "Lua" name and logo are copyrighted by PUC). So the new project could also suffer a big visibility hit outside Lua community (which, moreover, is not so large as other communities, like that of Python, for example).
Moreover, Roberto could have signed NDAs with PUC about any development resource it is used at Lab Lua to develop Lua itself. Depending on which kind of contract they are under, PUC could even prohibit other members of Lab Lua/Lua team to contribute to Roberto's fork, while they are still PUC employees!
Therefore, although Roberto could fork Lua and start, say, "BobLua", (and I think the entire community would stand by his side), it is debatable whether the old development process could be seamlessly migrated to the new project (close development processes are intrinsically "non-portable" - that's another disadvantage). All this could slow Lua development to a crawl (worst case scenario, of course).
Please note that I'm purposefully depicting a catastrophic scenario here, just because it seems to me that your answer to my post missed the points I wanted to made (It wasn't a post about "how bad close development is", but about "how dumb managers could be"). Hence I felt compelled to describe a "nuclear scenario" here, just to make my point clearer.
I'm actually not /that/ pessimistic about Lua, but my direct knowledge of managers of educational institutions - both private and public - makes me quite wary on the subject. 



SteveT




Cheers!

-- Lorenzo