Ditto, as I've said several times: Lua (and for that matter, its standard
libraries) are extremely effective yet small. Extend this philosophy, and
it should be possible to get a general-purpose scripting system with a
good range of libraries that gives 80% of the functionality of Perl or
Python in 20% of the size. I appreciate that as you expand the scope of a
system compactness is harder to maintain, but there's a difference of
emphasis I sense in Lua that may help: namely, a willingness to rely on
library routines a bit less in any given project. It seems to me that
overeagerness to use libraries can sometimes slow down development (e.g.
by using a library ill-suited to the task in hand, or by learning a large
and complex library merely to use one or two routines). Paradoxically, if
the Lua system itself is to be kept small, this attitude should be avoided
internally, but that's the difference between heavily reused system code
and one-shot application code.
