Re: Help a journalist with an article

[KHMan <keinhong@...>]

Esther Schindler 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?

IMHO, I'm not so sure that we, the Lua community, should be making 
such claims, at least in the direction you appear to be taking the 
story. IMHO, historically, the Lua community does little of the 
evangelism-style cheerleading, so you might misconstrue it as 
closed or less-than-cooperative. Not going on a Ruby-on-Rails 
style marketing binge doesn't mean we're abnormal.

Lua cannot be equated to traditional "[IT Manager's]" or 
"enterprise work". Look at http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaUses, it's 
not traditional enterprise IT languages or frameworks etc. I'd be 
very careful about what "enterprise work" to recommend. A bunch of 
nice quotes is good, but to who and to what "enterprise work" are 
we directing those quotes? Cheerleading should be matched to what 
you are cheering for. A mismatch is bad, and might make us look 
bad if our quotes are tied to the wrong things.

While Lua boosters are right to say that Lua deserves more 
attention, we should explain properly the niche where Lua excels. 
Be careful of over-enthusiastic fans or overblown claims. Niche or 
embedded applications may or may not be relevant to your story 
series. If this is about talking to people with large databases 
and frameworks and web or application servers in data centers, 
then I'm not so sure you should be including Lua.

[Don't quote me, I am just discussing this thing here.]

> 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?
> [snip]

--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia