Re: Standard for Lua

["Andy Stark" <AStark@...>]

>Lua is already in a whole lot of applications. But Lua cannot win 
>all the time, because many parties will defend their own choice of 
>scripting language religiously. Try swaying the mind of a Python 
>evangelist... :-)

Language standards probably made more sense when all implementations were
secrets owned by companies but with open source there is always one
definitive implementation anyway. It seems like a long time ago, but
JavaScript was actually proprietary once and there is still
(intentionally) no single reference implementation. That's why the ECMA
standard is useful there, perhaps.

As regards mass adoption, Lua's real problem is that it is unobtrusive,
just like all other things (and people) that do their job really well.
There's a proverb (Chinese, I think): the doctor who prevents illness is
not known beyond his street; the doctor who heals the sick is not known
outside his town; the doctor who tries to save the dying is known
throughout the land...

It's been said many times that Windows supports a whole micro-economy of
products and services based purely around its faults - each of those
products has an advert with the word "Windows" in it somewhere. I'm sure
that I discovered PHP by noticing those conspicuous ".php" filenames in
URLs and in error pages and I bet thousands of other people did the same.
Lua solves a clearly defined problem efficiently and is actually installed
on thousand of machines (think WoW, Lightroom, modo, Baldur's Gate,
VoodooPad, etc) but few people know it is there.

So, Roberto + team, you're not trying hard enough - make Lua WORSE next
version ;-) Make the garbage collection slow and unpredictable and the
pauses will become known as Lua Breaks. Make the syntax unreadable and we
will get books like "Unravelling the mysteries of Lua" and "Lua Best
Practice". Make the interpreter unreliable and ensure that the error
messages are dumped straight to the screen via OpenGL: "Lua error 28976A:
impossible happened".

(Ignore me, I'm really too cynical to post messages to mailing lists...)

&.


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