Re: Lua's opportunity

[Jimmie Houchin <jhouchin@...>]

Peter Sommerfeld wrote:
> Jimmie Houchin wrote:
> > I believe there is great potential for the future of Lua. I think Lua
> > could offer an excellent alternative to Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.
>
> I don't think Lua fits in that camp. It's range of application is
> much broader, Scheme or even Erlang may be closer.

I agree that Lua's range of application is broader. However, the lack of 
libraries either included in a standard install or easily installable 
from a repository does reduce the ability for more user/consumer style 
programmers to be able to use Lua as their tool of choice. And that's 
ashame because as a language I think Lua competes fantastically. :)

> > A standardized object oriented programming model. But one that does 
> > not  eliminate or reduce the available to program in other paradigms.
>
> Lua provides closures, metatables and even the colon syntax. What
> else do you need ? OOP is not of  particular importance in a language 
> like Lua,  I even think that the colon syntax is superfluous.

Well, I basically am referencing comments about everyone rolling their 
own flavor of OOP in Lua. (SWIG thread)
How important OOP is to Lua I cannot say. But for many it is their 
preferred programming paradigm. And since Lua does support OOP, there is 
no reason to not do it consistently and well. If I misread the roll your

> > Am I wrong? What do the long time Lua users think? What can we, the 
> > Lua  community do to achieve a better future for Lua? 
>
> I'm neither a professionell nor a long time user but I'm quite
> pleased  as it is. I'm not convinced that a large and fast growing
> user community is a good measure for success.

I don't believe that anybody is wanting to use size of community as a 
measure of success necessarily. However, certain critical mass is nice.

Small communities with sufficient mass and a nice language can 
accomplish much.

Jimmie