Re: The source file culture

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 3:35 PM, David Given<dg@cowlark.com> wrote:
> 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:

Well, I think we've experienced two users with very different laments,
Andre de Leiradella talking about the good old days when you could
'just' knock some C together with Lua and have an app, and George
talking about the difficulties of doing Lua without having to do C.
Both were not very coherent complaints, but that is the nature of a
lament, and attacking incoherence does not advance the cause.

OK, so what is the cause?  Most of us are embedded Lua people, and
have forgotten our frustrations with command-line tools, forgiven C,
and often content to use 30-year old technology (e.g emacs/vi, make).
>From that perspective, not wanting to go that path seems like a sign
of not being serious.  Then there are people who are attracted to a
fast, sane little programming language and want to use it in wider
applications, maybe even as an application library.  I'm in both
camps, I like Lua because it reduces the amount of C++ I need write;
the headaches I get with C++ are not related to my skill level, just a
recognition that most C++ is probably premature optimization in the
Knuth sense.

There are initiatives to make Lua a better all-purpose scripting
language, and mostly these don't worry the embedders, unless like
Andre they think it is complicating that simple idylic C + Lua life.
So maybe when a scripter complains, then the embedders should remember
their own frustrations, just a little?

Otherwise, we do come across as elitist and snotty, and that does us
no favours in the long term.

steve d.