Re: Ruby philosophy vs Lua philosophy

["D. Matt Placek" <atomicsuntan@...>]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@trms.com> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 2:46 PM, Petite Abeille
<petite.abeille@gmail.com> wrote:

The point is this: accessibility in the realm of "general scripting
language to use on its own and not embed into a big project" lags
behind the rest of the eco-system. This is neither bad nor good, in my
mind. Other tools work, does Lua need to cover their ground, as well
as its own? Probably not.

But let's face it. On the day that Lua 5.2 was announced, there was no
standard TCP/IP library that worked on major computing, without
hacking the source or finding some random guy's github repository (is
this still the case???). That sucks. Hard.

I think this is a fair critique.  I use Lua primarily embedded in a larger project, and if I have to write a quick one off script to do something useful, I'll start with Ruby every time.  That being said, I don't especially want Lua to become more like Ruby, or Python, or Perl because it's primary use to me is for embedding and adding scriptability and extensibility to a larger C/C++ centric project.  Every language has its niche, and in this space Lua is head and shoulders above anything else.  Having a better developed set of standard packages would help make Lua useful as a standalone scripting language; but once you start pulling in a bunch of other packages, the need for having a lightweight core language diminishes, and I would want something with more syntactic sugar, better metaprogramming capabilities, full continuations, etc. anyway.