Re: Clean Lua

[Patrick Donnelly <batrick@...>]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 9:05 AM, Paul Hudson <phudson@pobox.com> wrote:
>
> On 18 November 2011 13:51, Francesco Abbate <francesco.bbt@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> t doesn't mean that you can change the language without any
>> concern about compatibility.
>
> It's not reasonable to say that Luiz and Roberto made their decision
> "without any concern about compatibility". They were clearly concerned but
> decided to do what they did because to them they felt it the correct
> decision - for their own reasons, which have been explained here at length
> and I, at least, see no benefit in re-hashing them again. And it's their
> decision to make.

[I speak as an observer based on my experiences reading this list and
my limited interactions with the authors of Lua.]

People keep bringing up compatibility but the fact of the matter is
the authors encourage you to keep X version of Lua for your project as
long as your project exists. There is never a push to have you update
Lua alongside your application.

Lua evolves in necessary ways and doesn't keep parts that do not make
sense. While there is a "compatibility" consideration insofar that the
authors want to make simple *where possible* to translate Lua code
written in an older version of Lua to a new version, it is not central
consideration when making design decisions. This is a liberating mind
set when designing the language and allows them to "do it right" the
second time if they couldn't do it the first time.

To think of Lua as a specification for a programming language which
doesn't change is simply wrong.

-- 
- Patrick Donnelly