Popularity contest

[Dirk Laurie <dpl@...>]

<disclaimer> I am not a crypto-Rubyist.  I'll confess to being an apostate
  from Python, but I never have used Ruby, and probably never will.
</disclaimer>

A recurrent theme on this list is wishful thinking about what might
be in the next Lua, and the answer, often after unnecessary acrimony,
is usually one that no bright hopeful wants to hear: write your core 
patch or add-on module and put it on a page reachable from 
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaAddons.

I've just visited http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaPowerPatches (in search
of a readline-enabled version of file:read) and I can understand why
people feel p*ssed off when told to that.  Imagine telling your child 
who has just glued together a toy plane: "That's nice.  Now go and put 
it away in the loft."  Heck, some stuff in there was last updated in 2004 
(download patch for Lua 5.0.X).  Your shiny new Haskell syntax patch 
for Lua 5.2 will look great among those, OK?

Now suppose that the same page had just this: a "Like" button, and with 
each item: "xxx people liked this".  As in Facebook.

And another button that quickly scans the page for you (whether in Perl
or in Lua) and displays a table of contents of Lua power patches sorted
top to bottom by popularity.  

Dirk