Re: Why Lua is not more popular

[dcharno <dcharno@...>]

On Sep 13, 2013, at 4:00 AM, "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

I've tried to evangelize Lua on a number of projects. The issue for me has been standard libraries and the realization that there's not much interest in positioning Lua as alternative to other standalone scripting languages. I work on embedded platforms were size and performance are valued. People concede Lua is smaller, cleaner and faster (especially with LuaJIT). But, the platforms are changing and size has become much less an issue. Team members feel if we're going to add another language it might as well be something we can use on both the target and development machines for tools and various utilities. Python is already ubiquitous there and has a decent set of libraries builtin. That makes it hard to get enough "critical mass" for Lua adoption.