Re: The source file culture

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

2009/9/7 KHMan <keinhong@gmail.com>:
>
> Yeah, I think pure end users should go for a reliable platform, one where
> effort is put in by a group of people. If a pure end user go for
> single-author modules, that can be risky. The Lua ecosystem is still small
> compared to Perl or Python, given limited resources, a Lua platform will
> take a longer time to form and mature.

Being "reliable" has nothing to do with number of contributors, nor
whether a program is distributed as source or binary. In general,
source will last longer before rotting, and is easier to fix when it
does rot, but the most important thing is the quality of the code (in
particular, how portably it is written) and the commitment of the
maintainers.

> I think pure end users who want something that they can rely on for multiple
> years, who want a certain level of peace-of-mind that the kaboodle will
> usually always work, should strongly support the Lua platform initiatives.

Amongst programmers there is no such thing as a "pure end user". When
as a programmer one is choosing what languages and libraries to use,
there are a number of trade-offs, including the future development of
such code. How one makes those trade-offs depends critically on the
expected life-cycle of one's own software; consider for example the
differences between a game, a throwaway hack, an enterprise
dataprocessing utility and an open source cross-platform long-term
project. Backwards compatibillity, forwards compatibility,
performance, code quality and licensing are factors which assume
different importances in different scenarios.

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