Re: Why isn't Lua more widely used?

[Steve Litt <slitt@...>]

On Saturday, January 28, 2012 04:47:56 AM sergei karhof wrote:
> Why isn't Lua more widely used?
> Granted, being a script language, Lua can only hope for a niche
> position, and can never become as popular as C or C++.
> However, why is Lua *so much* underrated, compared to Javascript,
> for instance? Could not Lua be used in browsers and do as much a
> good job as Javascript? I mentioned browsers, but my point is more
> general.

Hi Sergei,

I'll give you my opinion -- others' may vary.

First of all, from the perspective of the actual language, I believe 
Lua is the best language on the planet. If I were stranded on a desert 
island with only one language, I'd choose Lua.

I think the reason Lua's popularity distantly trails its quality and 
utility is because what is available in Lua's LuaRocks is nowhere near 
the maturity and utility of CPAN or the equivalent facilities for 
Python and Ruby. I haven't actually tried Kepler etc, but from what I 
read it's not as ready for prime-time as Rails, Django and the like.

I recently had to create an mbox to MH converter and a maildir to MH 
converter. A couple had already been written using Python's mailbox 
component. There's no way I was going to rewrite that in Lua (or any 
other language). So I used Python (and interestingly it didn't work 
and I had to use IMAP instead).

SteveT

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