Re: Why Lua is not more popular

As someone (myself that is), very new to Lua -- which I got introduced to, thanks to a small section in FreeSWITCH documentation, I'd say that the "batteries not included" did seem a bit "unusual" and slightly "challenging". However, now about a week into my learning, and my first realistic yet tiny application nearing completion, I've found libs that work as advertised (e.g. "luars232", "alt-getopt" and "luasockets"). Also, I've installed all the luarocks that I found interesting at the luarocks site, but yes, there are a few which I am confused about (e.g. "watchman" vs an alternative that was suggested). Had one of those two been on luarocks site, I might have had less doubt.

OTOH, the relatively tiny size of Lua download, was such a welcome change !

On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:

On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 10:00:15 +0200
"Pierre Chapuis" <catwell@archlinux.us> wrote:

> I think this graph resumes the problem well.
>
> Apparently, when picking a language, people
> consider the availability of Open Source
> libraries the most important criterion and
> simplicity the *least* important...
>
> http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=826

Yes. I've mentioned open source libs as a reason I still use Python.

Most of the time, I'm in a position where I have to get it done in a
day or two. With Python, I can be pretty sure I can find the libs I
need to get the job done, whether it's SNMP, directory stuff, regex, or
most other things. Those libs will be tested and will be part of the
Python distribution. In other words, I can be pretty confident, when
using Python, once I've designed the thing, I can code it in a couple
days by just using libraries.

With Lua, there are many competing libraries in various states of
completeness and stability, so there's *much* more research required,
and I might end up needing to code from scratch a problem domain I
hardly understand. So the time I would have saved by using tables for
absolutely everything, and having functions just another piece of data,
and having closures, is often lost when I need to research or re-wheel
libraries.

By the way, I do office automation type programming, not embedded or
games. Obviously if I did game programming I wouldn't care about libs
for SNMP or database access and the like.

Like I mentioned before on this list, if we had some sort of wiki where
people could put their experiences with various things they grab out of
LuaRocks, as well as how they solved various problems, it would open up
Lua to a whole different group of people, because as a language, Lua
blows the doors off of Perl, Python, Ruby, C++, C, Java, etc. There's
something so incredibly beautiful about all complex data being
constructed from tables.

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance