Re: S.W.O.T analysis

[Jimmie Houchin <jlhouchin@...>]

On 10/26/2011 3:02 PM, Jon Akhtar wrote:
> Have you tried the Lua plugin for IntelliJ IDEA? 
> https://bitbucket.org/sylvanaar2/lua-for-idea/wiki/Home
No, I have not.
...

I downloaded a gave it a quick cursory view.

I am in general not a big fan of Java based IDEs. They are incredibly 
heavy, memory intensive and waste motion and visual space for things 
that don't really matter if you are not using Java.

I created a single Lua project and opened a single Lua script. 150Mb of ram.

I have SciTE open with about 20 files and it uses 1.5 Mb of ram.

Now I know SciTE will not do everything that the Lua plugin will do. But 
I would rather learn how to script SciTE and improve its user experience.

I just don't believe it takes 100+ Mb of ram to offer a great experience 
for a dynamic language like Lua. I can use Pharo/Squeak Smalltalk and 
have a user experience far better than anything Java offers and do so in 
15-30Mb of ram.

So why am I wanting to use Lua and not Pharo if the user experience is 
so great?  :)

Because Lua offers better interoperability with the outside world.
Because Lua is a very nice language.
Because Lua is being used in an application I am using.

But I don't see any technical reason that the user experience for Lua 
users can't be improved.
I believe that the tools for doing so can be written in Lua. Thus making 
our user experience within our control by eating our own dogfood.

And I don't believe that SciTE is necessarily going to be the ultimate 
user experience for Lua. I don't know that we know what that is yet.

But I do believe that a better user experience can be made with SciTE. 
And that this light weight tool could be a nice default user experience.

Thanks for the suggestion, even if I didn't go that direction.

Jimmie