Re: Why Lua is not more popular

[Robert Virding <robert.virding@...>]

We have the same problems when trying to spread Erlang. The Paul Graham essay "Beating the Averages" http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html gives some reasons for this, see the section on Blub. However I  think the situation is not as bad as it seems. There are probably many places using Lua who just don't mention it: either because they see it as just a tool so why should they mention it; or they see it as a strategic decision that they would not like to advertise. We have the same situation with Erlang in that you first learn a company is using it when you actually talk to someone in the company.

Btw I don't see Erlang and Lua as competitors as they languages which have a different view of the world and have been designed to attack different types of problems. I know of some companies which use both Erlang and Lua (plus other languages) together in their system for different purposes and are happy with their decision. It is not difficult to interface the two languages.

Robert

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sean Conner" <sean@conman.org>
> To: "Lua mailing list" <lua-l@lists.lua.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, 17 September, 2013 1:57:42 AM
> Subject: Re: Why Lua is not more popular
> 
> 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
> 
> 
>