Tim Kelly wrote:
Apparently my explaining how things work in North America is
misunderstood.
Not at all.
You said forced upgrades and features customers don't want. That is what
has been getting the reaction. Product upgrades containing bug fixes and
features customers want are good things, but just releasing an upgrade to
gouge your customers, thats shoddy practice.
The company I work for releases updates for all our software products on a
regular basis. But those updates are bug fixes and improvements to the
feature set, not just something to squeeze more cash out of the customer.
I do think it bizarre that people writing Lua scripts are expected to be
able to maintain their own version of Lua.
Expected to? No. Its an option you can choose to do if you are worried
that Lua will someday disappear. Thats an option VB users don't have. How
do those VB users maintain their runtime? It seems that despite Lua
winning this comparison you still favour the outcome that leaves you in
the position of the VB users.
>I tried to explain why the absence of a structure roadmap can be seen
as a negative to
>companies considering bids. I even volunteered to write one, but no
one seconded me.
How can you write the roadmap (if one were to be written) given that you
are not in control of the choices? I'm assuming Roberto and a few others
have the most leverage over issues like that.
There is nothing to stop you writing a document that describes the pros
and cons of Lua, the choices companies like Adobe and the World of
Warcraft people (I don't know their name, I don't play the game) make and
so on. Adobe have the resources, two existing languages and the finance to
write their own language. They didn't, they chose an existing language.
Thats a very powerful argument.
I bought my first version of Photoshop when it ran on Windows 3.1. That
was 1994. 13 years ago. Photoshop is still the market leader. I'm betting
that Adobe expect Lightroom to be a viable product in another 10 years,
still with Lua inside it.
>Instead, I feel rather attacked for asking for assurances of long term
stability.
You've been given them. But not in the form of a roadmap or a
multi-million dollar company standing behind the product.
We've ported several hundred thousand lines of C++ to work with Lua. There
have been changes to Lua during this time. Zero changes damaged the work
we have done over these years. Some changes in Lua 5.1 (to the memory
allocation API) made one of our software tools much easier to write and
implement. Support from the mailing list on the few occasions we've been
unable to work stuff out on our own has been excellent.
The source code is easy to read. Lua has one book published, in two
versions that describes the language. For a language to get its own book
should mean something. Its not vanity publishing, that is for sure.
In a previous post you cited PHP and Perl. We've also ported some of our
tools to PHP and Perl. Doing so was a lot harder than doing the same task
for Lua. Lua was roughly the same difficultly level as porting to support
Python and Ruby.
I asked for assurances because I am tired of choosing technologies that
suddenly decide to go in completely different directions.
But apparently you also conclude that because Lua isn't doing that, that
it is stagnant. You can't have it both ways. Either you are happy that it
Lua is stable, content and slowly changing or you are happy that Lua is
going off in umpteen different flavours (like Linux).
Lua is nearly 15 years old and on version 5.1. That indicates, that on
average it takes just under 3 years per release. Seems like they consider
things and don't just randomly change direction.
I did not wish to invest time and energy in Lua knowing that it was not a
mainstream choice for scripting unless I could feel really confident
in Lua.
How much more mainstream can you get than Adobe and arguably the most
populous online game in the world, World of Warcraft? You cite you want
mainstream, but when you are shown it for some reason the dominant market
player, worldwide, in two categories (graphics and online gaming, both
multi-billion dollar categories) is not enough.
Lua has software tool support in the form of many open source tools and 5
commercial tools I can think of. Possibly also an IDE or two.
All the things are in place, that indicate "mainstream", except this
roadmap issue.
I spent time writing a binary<->decimal<->hexidecimal string converter in
Lua
Given Lua's philosophy, that would go in a library, not the core. Someone
please correct me if I'm wrong.
Perhaps you are mistaking the core for a library that sits around the
core? As others have noted for many things you would not be looking at
Lua, but at a Lua library and as such, you would be reliant on the
maintainer(s) of that library.
FWIW: I have no personal axe to grind with you. You are not being
attacked. Some of the concepts you present are.
Stephen
--
Stephen Kellett
Computer Consultancy, Software Development, Windows, C++, JavaScript,
Ruby, Java, Assembler, Performance Analysis, Troubleshooting
Object Media Limited
Reg Office: 24 Windmill Walk, Sutton, Ely, Cambs CB6 2NH.
Registered in England and Wales: Company Number: 02979036
http://www.objmedia.demon.co.uk
