Re: Grokking the Virtual Machine

["Ashwin Hirschi" <deery@...>]

> I am the new Javascript columnist for hotscripts.com's email newsletter,
> with a monthly circulation of 2/3 million. I am using my second month's
> article for a little Lua evangelism. The following is my proposed article
> which I have to submit in the next couple of days; it must be 100-150 words
> and I'm near the very top already, so there won't be much I can add, though
> I could change things depending on feedback.

It's nice to see someone spread the word about Lua! As far as feedback goes:

David and Peter make points that cannot be stressed enough. Lua is definitely popular outside of Brazil, and it started out (and is very suited) as a language to extend applications. Actually, the first paragraph of Lua's about page ( http://www.lua.org/about.html ) catches it really well:

"Lua is a powerful light-weight programming language designed for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a general-purpose, stand-alone language."

That second phrase is one I'd like to illustrate: I'm not a game programmer, but an independent developer [for want of a better word]. We've been using Lua to write everything from little in-house tools, standalone Windows products, client-server systems and web-applications.

For the last 3 years Lua has never let us down. This is not a point I post here flippantly. As a small company the quality of our output does have a rather direct impact on our cashflow [and thus our ability to pay that ever-lurking beast, named "Monthly Rent" ;-)].

Lua has proven itself to be one of the stronger links in our company chain. We've kind of reached the point where I find it very hard to imagine working life without it. So I feel very confident when I say that Lua is an excellent general-purpose language!

Ashwin.
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