Some thoughts (lua stand alone)

[Johann Höchtl <big.john@...>]

 Hello!

I'm absolutely new to lua but already impressed by the language design 
and also of it's excelent technical implementation. ( thinking of beeing 
stackless, (therefore) support of co-routines, multithreading (to come 
in 5.0?)  a real gc ...)

I got to know lua from the 'great computer language shootout' (copy this 
verbatim into google if you don't know what im refering to) and was 
impressed that it performed so well.

I realized mereley from the 'about' section of lua.org, that it is 
heavily used in embeded environments and by browsing through the mailing 
list i also realized that the majority of lua actually use it for that 
purpose and that language extensions or a common understanding how 
packages or how an object system should look like is mostly 
desencouraged --- because it may make the language 'bloated'.

This situation reminds me of scheme. A powerful language but even laking 
the most basic libraries thus rendering it more or less useless for 
industrial deployment as any attempt to port a pice of code to a 
different system would mean a huge expense.

I saw someone refering to Python as a bloated hog. IMHO it's not. You 
could rip of all it's standard packages (library) and still have a 
working system. If you really would like to see a bloated language take 
a look at Common Lisp.

I don't see the correlation between supplementing some standard 
libraries with a feared inability to embed lua in smaller systems. I 
also think that lua would have it's right to stand next to Python or 
Ruby or Perl. Ruby restricts itself to the 'everything is an object' 
style, Perl fosters the 'do it quick and dirty, but do it dirty' 
approach and Python has it's indentation style which pleases not everyone.

There are not very much weakly typed bytecode interpreted languages 
which really help the developer to focus on the problem and leave the 
gory details to the compiler/interpreter. In fact the only players in 
the same league like lua which come to my mind are lisp and scheme (I 
know, both offer implementations which compile to native code, but most 
don't).

And scheme by beeing so terse never took of.

So I would like to know what others think about it. You could put 
everything i wrote more snappy into the shorter statement: "I like it if 
lua gets bigger"

Kind regards,
   Johann