On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 9:48 PM, Esther Schindler
<esther@bitranch.com> wrote:
I'm doing an article for CIO.com on "5 [or whatever] languages
that ought to
be on your [IT Manager's] radar," and I'd like to include Lua. I'm
looking
for a short statement on why it's useful, and why the boss ought
to let you
use it for enterprise work. Any takers?
This is meant to be a short-and-sweet article: just its name, URL,
a quick
formal definition, and then one or two quotes from developers
about why they
think it's valuable. Imagine that you're trying to convince
someone's boss
to let you use it. What would you say?
Lua is valuable to me primarily because it enables rapid agile
development, exceeding what is possible with more traditional
languages. Lua doesn't try to do too much - instead it gives you the
required building blocks out of which it is possible to build anything
you want, in any way you want. The key benefits unique to Lua are the
fact that it is amazingly small, fast, and on a technical level a
masterpiece. Not every project manages to achieve so much with so
little of the dreaded "bloat".
I've become so hopelessly in love with Lua, I've incorporated it into
nearly all my recent projects, and yet it fits in nicely every time. I
think the technical term is "lunatic" :)
I am currently heading into using Lua as a standalone, rather than
embedded, language. It is still fitting the job perfectly. Thanks to
Lua I'm now looking at weeks, rather than months, in our development
schedule.
Matthew.
