Re: Reasons for a Web Developer to use Lua?

[HyperHacker <hyperhacker@...>]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 08:21, John Passaniti <john@japanisshinto.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 5:13 PM, HyperHacker <hyperhacker@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Recently there was some discussion about mod_lua on the Apache
>> developers mailing list. I mentioned there that I feel Lua could
>> replace PHP as the number one web scripting language if mod_lua
>> were stable (i.e. not still in beta) and it were implemented well (not
>> making some of PHP's mistakes such as putting everything in the
>> global scope with no consistent naming or parameter schemes). I've
>> wanted to use Lua for all the things I currently use PHP for ever
>> since I discovered it.
>
> What makes PHP powerful and popular isn't the language but the rich
> library of functions that nearly every installation of PHP has.  In
> fact, with some effort one could come up with a worse language than
> PHP with even weirder semantics, add random syntax to make it suck
> more, and require that all keywords be in Klingon transliterated into
> Chinese.  And despite all that, developers would still *love* it
> because 85% of what they want to do is handled by the library.  And
> they know that when deploying their application, those functions are
> going to be there.
>
> I'm an embedded systems guy, but occasionally I have to do some web
> work.  And although I grit my teeth every time I have to deal with
> PHP's assorted insanities, I still use it because most of the time I
> can find functions to do pretty much anything I need.  From a language
> perspective, I'd much prefer to use Lua or Forth or Scheme.  But with
> each of those languages, I'm not spending my time writing the
> application.  I'm spending it either searching for a binding to a
> library or writing the code myself from scratch.  Which is a very good
> thing in the embedded systems world where I need total control over
> everything.  But in the web world, I don't want that.  There I'm
> flying high above the hardware and want all those high-level
> abstractions and handy functions that are provided.
>
>

I agree, one of PHP's best features is it has so much built in. Yet,
one of Lua's best features is it has so little built in. Assuming we
can use require() normally with mod_lua, I think this could
potentially turn into a positive spiral - people write more Lua
modules/bindings to add functionality they miss from PHP, which then
attracts more people who wanted that functionality...

-- 
Sent from my toaster.