Re: Zoom out

[Tom Wrensch <twrensch@...>]

On Sat, 2 Feb 2002, John Belmonte wrote:

> What we have are the ingredients to make something new-- an efficient
> scripting core with a simple style and well-defined C interface, and a
> growing group of people who would like to see a system programming
> environment based on that core.  You can image that inside Perl and
> Python are cores similar to Lua-- not well defined because they never
> existed independent of their high-level scripting language-- but cores
> nonetheless.  (The fact that the functionality of Lua is equivalent to
> the core of these heavier languages, together with the focus given by
> the Lua authors, is the reason it runs so much faster.)  So here is an
> opportunity to make a high-level system scripting language from the
> bottom up, instead of top-down.  Not only that, but you have an
> experienced team working on the core.
> 
> So what I'm suggesting is that someone, or some group, take charge of
> this new thing.  Give it a mailing list and development site.  But
> most importantly, take a new perspective-- don't call it Lua, even if
> by license you can.

I would be quite happy if someone did this. However, I'd feel even
happier of two or three groups started doing it. One of the nice things
about Lua is that it is relatively simple to add to it for a particular
task. Thus we have LuaState and LuaSock and LuaSocket etc. While I agree
it is difficult to combine existing libraries into a fully-functional
executable, I'd rather depend on several different groups putting together
executables for different purposes than a single "standard" effort.

I don't think I need to go through the advantages and disadvantages of
standards. We've all seen that in other programming languages. A single,
standard effort is likely to produce a system that is either too large and
quickly becomes another Perl or Python or perhaps go the other direction
and not have quite enough in it to really satisfy anyone.

What I would like to see is several individuals or groups creating
"competing" enhancements to the Lua libraries for scripting. Of course,
since we're talking about open source efforts, they could easily borrow
from each other, so the best inovations are likely to exist in several of
the efforts.

I think much of the discussion on standard ways to load libraries was an
effort to allow people to roll their own scripting language from a
collection of libraries. That might be an even more effective approach.

In summary, I guess I'm saying that I'd like to see a lot more chaos
before the Lua community tries to develop the one true scripting version
of Lua.

  - Tom Wrensch