Re: Help a journalist with an article

["Vaughan McAlley" <ockegheim@...>]

I'm more of a musician than computer programmer, but over the years
have worked on a few music-related programs in C and Perl. I find that
whenever I return to these languages I basically have to restart at
the beginning. I wrote a whole CGI in Perl but now would have trouble
with a "Hello world" program.

On the other hand, my mind has taken a natural liking to Lua. I first
used it writing an addon for World of Warcraft, and had the basic
concepts under my belt very quickly. I'm now using it to analyze and
manipulate MIDI data in real time. By far the hardest part of the
project was writing the C code to do simple MIDI input and output. Now
that that's finished and I can work on my algorithm, programming in
Lua is easy. Quickly written whole blocks of code often work first
time as expected. I find Lua much easier to use than any other
languages I have tried, but it still has great performance.

-Vaughan

2008/10/10 Fabien <fleutot+lua@gmail.com>:
> I'm mainly using Lua at work on embedded devices that are too small,
> resources-wise, to run a decent port of better known dynamic languages (that
> would be Python and Ruby). It means that I get the advantages of dynamic
> languages productivity, where most of my competitors think they have to bear
> with C or Java's largely inferior prototyping / development / maintenance
> times.
>
> When compared to the big Perl / Python / Ruby, Lua arguably has:
> - a marginally cleaner core language (although that's not something that
> would interest a "pure manager"),
> - way fewer *mature* libraries (that's an issue if you have a problem which
> is addressed by a lib in another language; it's not necessarily the case if
> you develop something truly different)
> - much easier interfacing to C / C++: this partially fixes the point above,
> and allows to add dynamicity where it matters, in a program which is
> otherwise very static for performance reasons (that's probably the main
> reason why game developers love it, they're among the most power hungry
> people today)
> - with its "meta-mechanisms friendly" design, it lets you tune the
> language's semantics in depth. For instance, I'm working on a framework that
> requires a pretty special flavor of Object-Orientedness; after having
> written a meta-object protocol, it feels like it's natively supported by
> Lua.
>
> So if you're working on a pretty original task for which there exists little
> library code to reuse, with strong performance needs w.r.t. the available
> hardware, and if significant parts of your system ought to stay in C or C++,
> then Lua is your best choice IMO.
>
> -- Fabien.
>
>