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Just another humble opinion from someone who hasn't even used Lua for
anything serious yet:- All the ideas expressed so far about getting some commercial input into Lua seem to have one major flaw: they are all about making Lua resemble the languages that are already established ("Lua could compete with Rebol", "Lua should have a large standard library like Python does", "needs a graphical GUI, IDE", etc). I think Lua's very strength lies in the fact that it DOESN'T have these features. The philosophy behind Lua is that it should be very easy to embed and I think this requires it to be minimal but effective nevertheless. We have observed that, say, Python CAN be stripped down to a minimal implementation which can be embedded. But embeddability is not exactly Python's forte and is a relatively minor design issue in the language. For example, I doubt that Python could boast that it is "written in ANSI C, and compiles unmodified in all known platforms". You can't just pick Python up and drop it into your app. Lua, on the other hand IS specifically designed to be embeddable. I think this is what the authors intended it to be all along and this strength is what should be developed in the future. There is no point in adding features that are common in other languages (at least we shouldn't treat this as high priority) because we will simply end up re-inventing Python or Perl or Rebol. As programmers, we are all concerned about avoiding unnecessary code duplication, and this is code duplication of the worst kind: open source projects competing for the same niche! It will take considerable creative effort to preserve Lua's fresh and distinctive spirit because (I think) it is the first language whose syntax and implementation are specifically designed for "extreme" embeddability above all else. But if we put respectability above embeddability, then we will end up with another Python. Don't get me wrong, Python is great, but we don't need two of them! &. |