Luas Ballpark (Was: Re[2]: A "collaborative book" on Lua?)

[Gunnar Zötl <gz@...>]

TU> I don't know if Lua can catch up to Python in the areas that Python
TU> excels at.  Also, honestly I don't know if it's worth the effort; if
TU> the goal is popularity and longevity, Lua should probably continue to
TU> focus mainly on the areas where it has good acceptance.  As far as
TU> book sales go, I think a book like "Game Programming with Lua" might
TU> do OK.

IMO there should always be a core lua, which is, as it is now: small,
fast, portable, no frills. It was this that made me go for lua after
checking a few alternatives for an application scripting language. It
has a reasonably pleasant syntax, can easily be extended, and does not
come with a huge pool of (system-dependent) "features" and libraries
for all sorts of stuff, which I really do not need nor want. Plus, I
like the "meta-feature" approach.

Python, Perl, Ruby and the others may be fine and all, but they are
huge, not really portable or weird... (perl being a good example for
the latter, eventhough I would always go for perl for text mangling).
Also, at least perl and ruby have language features that are system
dependent and should rather be placed in a library (consider the
backticks, for example). The vast amount of available libraries for
these languages may also actually be a hindrance for embedding use.

Don't get me wrong, IMO loadlib and friends are a good thing, and so
are libraries, but I feel that these things should not be a part of
the core language.

Gunnar