Re: Lua awareness

[liam mail <liam.list@...>]

On 10 December 2012 15:29, Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> If you are talking about the Q&A section, I am afraid you are twisting
> my words. The question was about keeping the Lua code base in a public
> repository, not about Lua being open developed.
>
>

Sorry there would seem to be some confusion here over open development
and open development, where one is developed in a public repository
and the other allowing anyone to commit to the repository. My
intention was never to mean the second; also being developed in the
open is also different in my eyes from having a stable code base in
the public as it does not show the development.

So why and how could a publicly viewable repo which shows the
development be helpful?
Well as you correctly pointed out it would generate noise, yet not all
noise is bad. Excitement, talking about current implementations et al
could help in spreading this noise to externel entities. If there was
concern that this noise would bog you and the team down when posted to
lua-l then there is always the possibility of creating another mailing
list so that this would be 'users' and the other 'dev', This does not
mean that yourself or other members of the team should feel obligated
to answer and discuss threads posted to 'dev' as I understand that
your time is precious, but these conversations could over spill on to
other mediums such as twitter, G+, Reddit, Hackernews etc and help
spread Lua.


>> 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
>> 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
>> 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.
>
> Again I think you are twisting my words. The question was whether I
> had anything to say on *how* to make Lua more popular. Most proposals
> I see about making Lua more popular involve changing the language, and
> then I fully agree with Hans that we are not in a popularity context:
> we do not develop the language aiming for increasing its popularity.
>

There are some things I would like to see in the language but please
do not take this the wrong way as this is not what the thread was
about, instead it was about promoting Lua as a language to the vast
majority, even of programmers, that do not know of the language. The
question was if you had any ideas on how to make it more popular yet
you go on to say it is good and imply you do not want it to gain much
more popularity[1].

> About other means to improve its popularity, I agree with your call
> that it is up to the community, much more than to us, to work on that
> (talking about the language, replying to forums, voting things up, and,
> specially, building success cases and talking about them).
>

Sadly I feel this is the case because the team does not seem willing
to do much about it itself, although I do acknowledge papers which
have been written by them and with LHF answering questions on mediums
such as StackOverflow. However for anything done by someone not from
the team, the result pails into insignificance by your actions and
words. For example look at the view counts of the youtube
presentations of the workshop, which has the most views? How many
links do you see to documents and interviews which the team has done
posted to the interent and constantly posted?


[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=-VQBw5OpJIQ#t=2478s

--Liam