RE: A citation on Lua

["Gavin Kistner" <gavin.kistner@...>]

From: perlster
[snip]
> So far, the Lua test-driving experience has sucked!
> However, something tells me that this is the language
> that I should be using for web development.

Really? I really like Lua, but I would strongly disagree.

In my opinion, Lua's strengths are:
  * ease of embedding into other applications
  * small size of interpretter
  * fast speed of execution, and reasonably low memory usage
  * simple core makes it easy to learn and flexible to code in
  * dynamic (mostly) strongly typed variables

Your needs may differ from mine, but for web development very little of
that matters to me. I need a language that prioritizes my time, and
makes me more efficient, not the machine. Web servers are fast, and (I
believe) most of the time involved in a transaction is due to latency,
file IO, and database overhead. Programming in Lua is fun for me, but
it's still programming. There's still a large amount of typing to
support the moderately verbose syntax. There's still a fair amount of
bending the task at hand to the limited toolset available in Lua.

For web development, I personally chose Ruby (both on Rails and with
other libraries). Its interpretter is neither small nor speedy. It is
not easy to embed in other applications. However, it has a rich set of
features available for general purpose programming as well as web
development. Its syntax is more terse than Lua (but not so terse as
Perl) and, for me, programming in it is a joy. Code just flows out of my
fingers. As one amusing community member put it in Haiku:
  A ruby program
  before I even notice
  is already done

I'm not bashing Lua. I'm not pushing Ruby over it. I'm not bashing you
for thinking that it's the language you think you should learn for web
development. But I am interested in what made you choose it for web
development.