Re: and Lua marches on

[Tobias Kieslich <tobias@...>]

On Tue, 15 Dec 2009, Bertrand Mansion wrote:
> 
> Being the developer of PEAR's HTML_QuickForm, HTML_Table,
> Event_Dispatcher and a few others, I don't find my code so bad...
> HTML_Table is almost 9 years old and it's still being downloaded 4000
> times per month, QuickForm is downloaded 50000 times on every release.
> So I guess others don't find all code in PEAR as awful as you do :) I
> personally find it useful and, while not perfect, in most cases it
> improves my productivity or give good examples when you want to build
> your own modules.
This was not targetted on particular people, but I spent my share of
time on debugging PEAR stuff, which I thought would be useful but I
would have been better off to implement the desired functionality myself,
which would of cause not have covered the whole scope of a PAER module..
Did that in PHP and in Python and while I'm still not a big fan of the
NIH syndrome I can see why people reinvent wheels every once in a time.

Also, I don't think it's a bad idea to have a standard library. The D
language showed how tricky tha can be (with the long time competition of
Phobos and tango).

> Lua is just missing essential stable libraries for XML, SQL, I18N,
> multibyte strings, etc. Apart from that, it's already ok for web
> development.
I entirely agree on Lua missing stuff, generic libraries that make the
implementation of common tasks easier. However, I kind of disagree with
the multibyte strings. Supporting more encodings makes interoperability
easier, but you end up implementing each and every string function for
every encoding wich gets messy in no time. Stick to what we have, the
8 bit encoding and make the string library UTF-8 aware. Multibyte
strings hould be handled on input and output only. Keeps the language
clean and allows for interoperability. It would be a good idea for Web
development in Lua to define something like CommonJS in JavaScript. It
would not alter the language, neither would it require to wait for
features to be implemented. But it must be properly documented and
that's what CommonJS is all about.

	-T