Re: [ANN] Idle Script - pre-alpha release

[Fabien <fleutot+lua@...>]

Since 5.1, maybe even 5.0, Lua has everything it takes to be the core of a "serious", standalone language. It's a good thing that people try to get that Lua-based platform stuff up and running, and this attempt isn't the first one. It's even more important that the default Lua remains what it is: a conceptually minimalist (in a positive sense of course) language, which can be easily plugged in any project lacking high-level structuring, and can be easily tweaked. This is the niche that brought success to Lua, and a niche is the most valuable asset a language can have.

It's also very important that its designers remain very cautious about extensions and experimental features: I'm a big fan of OCaml for instance, but all the experimental warts that have been stuck on it in its history make it sometimes feel kludgy; due to its designers' prudence (and their abillity to break backward compatibility), Lua remained extremely clean, and that makes most of its appeal.

Having people experiment with Lua tweaks on a per-project basis is maybe *the* core, distinctive feature of Lua. Having people maintaining slightly larger scale experiments, which can be reused by many others, without cluttering the "main branch", is useful: it brings cool features to a subset of users, and lets ideas mature and face real-world usage: some of these tried-and-refined ideas should eventually be back-ported in Lua.

That being said, since these augmented Luas mainly make sense with respect to Lua, I think it's much better for them to have a name which clearly states this filiation. Don't forget that there are hundreds of scripting languages around there, and we won't spare more than one minute judging most of them. Let us a chance to judge it by its cover!