Re: Why Lua is not more popular

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Dan Tull once stated:
> > The idea of binding generators has always struck me as a squishy 
> > way to get something to work now, which will be a problem ...
> I think of the half dozen or so Adobe products using Lua, a couple
> of teams have tried using binding generators and none of them
> were satisfied enough with the results to take that course.
> 
> What I tend to find is that bindings aren't all that hard and often
> the API you want to expose to Lua isn't the one you'd get if you
> exhaustively/mechanically translated it anyway.

  Another thing I've found (by doing Lua bindings by hand) is that a
mechanical approach really doesn't make for good Lua bindings.  Such a
mechanial approach to syslog() would end up with:

	syslog(5,string.format("The foo is %s",status))

Or ...

	LOG_NOTICE = 5
	syslog(LOG_NOTICE,string.format("The foo is %s",status))

Or

	syslog("LOG_NOTICE",string.format("The foo is %s",status))

Doing it by hand, I did [1]:

	syslog('notice',"The foo is %s",status)

which is MUCH nicer (IMHO) than other syslog() interfaces for Lua I've seen.

  -spc 

[1]	https://github.com/spc476/lua-conmanorg/blob/master/src/syslog.c