Re: Ruby philosophy vs Lua philosophy

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Ross Bencina
<rossb-lists@audiomulch.com> wrote:
> My two cents is that what you're looking for, is (and should) be covered by
> satellite project (like luvit to pick one example). This is analogous to a
> Linux distro. Distros aggregate and package libraries, the core kernel team
> just do kernels.

That's pretty much it. Linus has opinions about Linux userland (being
Linus) but no one takes him seriously. The Lua team have better
manners and stay out of userland discussions, unless they have
contributed in their capacity as individuals.

Most of the machinery is in place; Peter Drahos has done a marvelous
job of creating a cross-platform build framework, and Hisham continues
to manage LuaRocks as a distribution channel.  He should get a vote of
thanks for this, because the demise of the Kepler project left a big
hole in the Lua ecosystem (funded open-source projects have difficulty
continuing after the party is over), and he has kept his part going.

Occaisionly the Larry Wall term 'blessed' appears in the list; of all
the zillion JSON Lua libraries out there, which one is 'blessed'? It's
not PUC Rio's job to issue blessings.  There are dozens of forks of
core projects out there, but no road map - naturally Joe Developer is
not going to say 'Well, my LuaSocket is now blessed' because we would
find that kind of ... pushy.  When I did my micro Lua 5.2
distribution, luabuild, I basically did the 5.2 porting myself because
there was no way of knowing the status of the forks.

It's not a dismal situation, really.  The language continues to excel
in the embedded space, although there are those of us who like Lua for
'desktop' work.  Documentation (especially meta-documentation)
continues to be an issue.  As a participant in a Lambda-the-Ultimate
discussion about the importance of libraries said: "it's a social
problem, and if I was more social I could do something about it"

steve d/