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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