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On 2012-12-09 7:11 AM, "liam mail" <liam.list@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9 December 2012 06:27, steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 9:11 PM, Henk Boom <henk@henk.ca> wrote:
> >> Maybe try crossposting to r/programming?
> >
> > Nice one on the proggit front page today:
> >
> > http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/14ip2d/pushing_nginx_to_its_limit_with_lua/
> >
> > steve d.
> >
>
> Yes I did x-post to /r/programming yet unfortunately that post
> immediately got down voted :(
>
> To me it seems that not very many people in the Lua community want Lua
> to gain a wider appeal, even Roberto's shrug of his shoulders and
> comment in the Workshop seems to me to indicate this. If I just pick
> some figures out of the air for a moment.
> 1500 /r/lua members
> 2000 lua-l members
> lets say 10% of lua-l members have reddit accounts and the same 10%
> have hackernews accounts.
>
> Is the community doing enough to promote Lua?
> Personally I up vote pretty much anything on /r/lua, Hackernews etc
> which talks or links to Lua.
>
> --Liam
>
When people ask me what language they should use/learn for something, I usually mention Lua, if it's appropriate. But then the same few issues come up... "Well the standard library is pretty minimal[1]... The socket library doesn't appear to be maintained anymore... A lot of things, including LuaSocket and LuaJIT[2] aren't compatible with 5.2 and might never be..." and people are turned off pretty quickly.
[1] Of course a minimal standard library is not necessarily a bad thing, though as someone who hates having dependencies on third-party code, I've written a fairly large set of "standard" libraries of my own (to be released Real Soon Now™), and a lot of people are turned off by the idea that the best "standard" libraries are not standard at all, but maintained and disturbed separately by third parties.
[2] Last I heard, LuaJIT supports a number of 5.2 features, but lacks at least __ENV, which is a deal-breaker for me.
People are a little put off by the idea that batteries are not included, and when you start saying "if you use this or this or this or this library, you'll have to stick with an older version of the language" people start to look at Python - and I can't really blame them. It is pretty annoying.