Re: crawling the web

[Norman Ramsey <nr@...>]

 > Norman Ramsey wrote:
 > > P.S. If I sound cranky, it's because I've spent 2 years working on
 > > APIs for email management and spam filtering, and they are still too
 > > complicated.  I will give a talk at the Lua Workshop in July.
 > >
 > >   
 > Not to steal any thunder from your talk, but "too complicated" because 
 > of Lua or because it's just a tough problem to come up with a good API?

Lua makes it more difficult because it provides no formal way to
express an API---certainly nothing that is checked by the compiler.
We've addressed this problem, but to say more would steal thunder from
my talk ;-)

Another thing that Lua makes difficult is that there is no universal
system for distributing code.  Our software would be much better off
if broken into separate packages, but for the vast majority of users,
such a distribution mechanism would create unnecessary headache.
This problem is not at all unique to Lua; I know of very few
language-based efforts to express these kinds of dependencies.


Norman