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On 12/9/2012 3:41 PM, liam mail wrote:

On 9 December 2012 12:31, Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl> wrote:


In many case Lua is (cf. its intention) part of something else. I can only
speak for luatex, but I'm pretty sure that by now quite some tex users are
aware of Lua but you won't find them on this list or reddit or whatever but
on tex related lists.


That sounds good, although these are now the converted or at least the
people who know about the Language.


That's also where they discuss Lua related issues. In
the journals of tex user groups there have been (and will be) articles
mentioning / showing lua, at user group meetings and conferences there are
talks about it, on support lists it's discusses, in distributions it's used,
etc.



Do you have links for these please?


The main site:

http://www.luatex.org/

A few journal links: (more than one year old issues are online):

http://ntg.nl/maps/index.html
http://www.tug.org/tugboat/contents.html

first part of history of luatex:

http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/mk.pdf

(second part coming, but much is first published as article)
As about 50% of context mkiv is written in lua (the old version is tex only and uses pdftex) quite some lua usage can be seen on http://wiki.contextgarden.net.
As luatex dev is driven by context dev people, one can always find the latest versions on the context wiki, but texlive also ships with luatex as one of the three main engines (pdftex/xetex/luatex). 


Personally I don't give much about these popularity polls (and I wonder if
these internet polls can be trusted anyway). It's like politics: is the one
getting most votes also the best?



I am somewhat of a similar mind but in the same breath I feel Lua does
have a problem where people are not aware of the Language; also we all
know it has been said many times "No one talks about Lua".


I really like the pace of development of Lua as well as the professionality
of the dev team.


Debatable, the team seems to dismiss the idea of open development as
they do not see it having _any_ benefits where as I, maybe wrongly,
feel this would be one small step to fixing them problem.
I used perl and after that ruby quite a lot but I'm pretty glad that I ended up at Lua. I think that it's open enough (source code published, discussion list, known authors, etc.). The well controlled development suits tex quite well (as it is also quite controlled with long term developers and a focus on stable engines).
I don't see what benefits 'more open development' would bring to the language. To me it looks like the authors are dedicated to go on for quite a while which is good for stability and consistently. Of course I can think of a few things that I'd like to see, but at the same time I'm glad that it is the way it is.
(Btw, one reason for me to never look at for instance python are those related religious discussions where one is considered an idiot when not using that language.) 


For me that's worth more than the language ending up high
on some list. The team makes me feel that we've chosen the right language, I
don't need to look at popularity contest for that.

Hans



Your message sounds a lot like "Lua does not have a problem" which is
what I said in the previous mail. Instead of the majority of people


Indeed. I see no problems.


who know about the Language treating it as a toy, some would like to
work with the language on a paid basis which is currently only
possible for a select few. I do not foresee the prospects improving
One can always use Lua in combination with other languages and/or hide its usage for the end user. As tex programmer I'm quite accustomed to having programs act sort of invisible. In fact, most of our customers don't even know what tools we use, as long as we can do the job (which in many cases is only possible because of the tex/lua combination) 


much without something actively being done about it and seeing the
team really don't seem to care much about the situation[1] maybe it is
for the community to step up.


Sure, no reason to bother developers with that.


[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=-VQBw5OpJIQ#t=2455s
Great, the perfect answer to me ... and when I watched Roberto's presentation about plans for Lua I was again glad that we've chosen for Lua (and a bit sad that I couldn't participate in some of the discussions - unicode, lpeg etc). 

Hans

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