Re: Ruby philosophy vs Lua philosophy

["Aaron B." <aaron@...>]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:58:52 -0600
Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@trms.com> wrote:

> 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.
> 
> For those that feel a connection with this community, or language, or
> whatever one associates with their need to evangelize for the
> language, we should be ashamed. Lua as a language is a garden
> well-tended. The front yard has a rusted, bullet hole-ridden Camaro on
> blocks, a busted toilet and a washer-machine.

This resonates with my biggest complaint with Lua thus far: I've got a
stack of modules I'm mainting myself for various bugfixes/features that
I needed. I'm not pointing any fingers or trying to blame anyone, but
most every time I try to push a patch upstream either the maintainer
has disappeared, or it makes it into source control but never gets
released.


> If anyone cares to know what my prescription for fixing it is: a
> bigger asshole leading the initiative. Someone up top has to care
> about this and start ordering people around. Without this, it won't
> happen and again, it doesn't have to, in order for Lua to be
> considered a success, which it already is.

...and the highest praise I have for this community is that, as of yet,
I haven't found a single asshole. I want it to stay that way.

My prescription is to hurry up and wait. I expect de-facto standards
will form with time as Lua's mindshare and userbase expands. Good
software - and the communities that support them - take a lot of man
hours and growing pains. Linux (and *BSD, and Windows, etc) all didn't
get to what they are by climbing a mountain, they got there by
constantly dragging themselves towards always-just-out-of-reach ideal,
an ideal which moves and evolves just as much as the imperfect
codebase does.


-- 
Aaron B. <aaron@zadzmo.org>