Re: general newbie question about lua

["Andrew Wilson" <agrwagrw@...>]

Hi Onay,

If you deeply checkout the following web sites, you'll develop your
own opinion to answer a lot of your questions.

main lua site: http://www.lua.org/
lua forge: http://luaforge.net/
general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_programming_language

The Lua community is a pretty eclectic group. Lua community is also
relatively small, but Lua is highly regarded by it's user community
and in many well known software projects
(http://www.lua.org/uses.html)

If you can read the following books, you'll understand lua and where
lua is coming from...

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Lua-Second-Roberto-Ierusalimschy/dp/8590379825/ref=pd_sim_b_2/102-1976402-9627353
http://www.amazon.com/Lua-Reference-Manual-Roberto-Ierusalimschy/dp/8590379833/ref=pd_sim_b_1/102-1976402-9627353
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Lua-Programming-Programmer/dp/0470069171

In general Lua is really for embedding, but with module mechanism
added in 5.1 it can work well as a standalone system. Modules work
well as pure lua code or binary libraries. The install/setup hasn't
really been formalized into a standard alone one click install, most
libraries and executables are contributed by the community or
interested parties. So they would needed to be contacted directly
about components they have contributed (for example lua jit compiler
at http://luajit.luaforge.net/)

Lua communitys interest mainly seems to be games, scientific and web
programming (Kepler -http://www.keplerproject.org/).  Most users are
focused on small system or embedded uses (Games). Some scientific
libraries have been written, check with LuaForge
(http://luaforge.net/) to see what lua projects are out there.

This email is my opinions. But I think most Lua users would agree Lua
is an enjoyable, highly flexible, understandable dynamic language
system.

Cheers
Andrew Wilson