Re: The Lua FAQ ...

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

Lua list <lua@bazar2.conectiva.com.br> writes:

>Someone with an interest in finding a suitable scripting language for 
>embedding in an application (or for whatever reason really), with an 
>attention span of around one minute is not someone I'd worry too much 
>about, it's their loss, whatever they choose,
>and the opinions of such people tend to diffuse rapidly anyway.

Imagine the situation where an existing software project decides to add a
scripting language to its product. First, they must find a list of
candidate languages. There are *lots* of these, so they would restrict
their attention to the fairly well-known ones - the Tiobe list wouldn't be
a bad place to start. They might look through the ten or so scripting
languages among the Tiobe top 50, which would include Lua. They wouldn't
want to download and study the APIs of ten languages, so they would narrow
it down by looking at the websites for the most promising ones. On each
website, they would see "XXXLang is modern, robust, fast and embeddable",
so not much help there. With nothing else to consider, the shortlist would
almost certainly be JavaScript, Python and Ruby; they would probably
either choose JS or Python depending on whether they are more impressed by
web browsers or 3D modelling apps. At no point in the search do they
discover the embedding issues because Lua's website doesn't mention them
and none of
 the other languages even address them. We're not talking about people
with short attention spans here - they would believe they had made a
rational and thorough investigation and yet they wouldn't have ended up
with the best solution.

>It doesn't brag, it's not in your face, it doesn't try to sound 
>boombastic, it simply states it's intentions, and that of it's creators, 
>and nothing else. Lua let's it's own accomplishments do the talking.

Well, they do just happen to mention the register-based virtual machine,
incremental GC and the fact that being as fast as Lua is "an aspiration of
other scripting languages" ;-) Briefly mentioning the advantages for
embeddability isn't really any different.

>It's pretty much exactly the way it should be, 
>non-flaunting and informative.

Non-flaunting, yes. Informative, mostly but not completely.

&.


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