Re: The source file culture

[David Given <dg@...>]

Reuben Thomas wrote:
[...]
> Indeed, perhaps the most valuable lesson one can learn from it is that
> marketing counts, and that the Lua community, if it wants Lua to
> become more popular (and that is not a given) may need to work on the
> language's image as much as anything else. Alternatively, one can take
> the view that it's no big deal, and that image always tends to lag
> reality in any case (something that seems to be true even of the most
> widely-used and well-known languages and systems).

I remember one rather interesting conversation here a while back; 
someone was asking about using Lua for some purpose... enterprise data 
processing, I think. I was rather struck by the difference in attitude 
between the people here and the kind of community you get in, say, Ruby 
or Python:

Q. Why should I use [Language] for X?

Python community: It's great that you're considering Python, because 
it's the best language for the job! Python is really good at doing A, B 
and C, and if you were to change your architecture you could do D, E and 
F as well!

Lua community: I don't know. Why *should* you use Lua?

I think most people here see Lua as a component, intended to be 
customised and bolted into another product, rather than being used on 
its own. I write Lua scripts for doing quick hacks --- but they nearly 
always get a customised interpreter if they ever turn into anything more 
than a quick hack.

Here's some rather interesting statistics from the Debian Popularity 
Contest:

http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=lua5.1

35% of (participating) users have liblua5.1 installed (the shared 
library). 1% have lua5.1 installed (the command line interpreter). If 
you compare to ruby, 34% have ruby1.8 installed while 27% have 
libruby1.8 --- most ruby users use the interpreter. And if you check 
Python, most versions don't even *have* a separate library package!

(Also, check out that growth curve for liblua5.1...)

I think what I'm trying to say is that Lua users are weird and don't 
necessarily fall into the same demographic as with other scripting 
languages. I could be wrong, though --- I know *I'm* weird...

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