Re: [ANN] Lua-Núcleo 0.0.4

[Miles Bader <miles@...>]

David Manura <dm.lua@math2.org> writes:
>>> Please suggest a more politically correct name for this class of
>>> libraries then :-) (penlight, nixio, stdlib, lua-nucleo, ...)
>>
>> Batteries perhaps?
>
> Some have been using "batteries" to refer to roughly the set of well
> regarded libraries seen in distributions like LuaForWindows ("Lua
> for Windows is a 'batteries included environment' for the Lua
> scripting language on Windows").  It includes more focused libraries
> like luasocket, luafilesystem, LuaBitOp, lpeg, etc., many of which I
> find harder to live without than the so-called standard libraries
> (penlight, stdlib, etc...).  Members of the former set tend to do
> one thing and do it right.  The latter set I've been more
> apprehensive about (and haven't actually used beyond
> experimentation).

I agree with this.

Many "more focused libraries," including those you mention, have
become defacto standards in the Lua community, and generally seem to
be of pretty high quality.

This doesn't seem to be the case for any "miscellaneous" libraries, so
I'm a bit more wary of them.

It makes me think that maybe there's something fundamentally a bit
shaky with the concept of "swiss army knife" libraries, and that maybe
it would be best to avoid them...

This impression was reinforced by the discussion a while back about
"microlight", where many of the proposed functions seemed bizarrely
obscure -- clearly the author thought of them as "commonly useful"
enough to propose them, but they certainly didn't seem that way to me.
Such judgements seem to be somewhat personal, with the inevitable
result that a widely used swiss-army-knife library would end up being
a huge bloated bag of functions, with each function only being used by
a small subset of the community (kind of like MS word... :).

Maybe such an approach works for languages where bloat is basically
accepted, but I don't think it flies with Lua.

-miles

-- 
o The existentialist, not having a pillow, goes everywhere with the book by
  Sullivan, _I am going to spit on your graves_.