Re: Lua Ecosystem

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

On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 12:37 PM, steve donovan
<steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> enough.  So I hope that Lua Toolbox helps with the community-rating
> and discoverability aspects.

And btw, when we can see it in action? Even as a beta for interested parties?

I was planning on writing a whole article on 'reinventing wheels' but
decided that it would just contribute more text to an old topic.

Basically, the decision to 'reinvent a wheel' is based on perceived
cost.  If it takes more time and energy to find a suitable wheel than
to do a good-enough home-grown module, then implementers will do
exactly that.  (I say 'perceived' because people have different levels
of enthusiasm for reinvention. Being a compulsive hacker, I have to
sit on my hands sometimes to remain professional.)

There is a rather pessimistic paragraph: "'premature release of
wheels' just adds to the ever-growing junkyard of under-documented
wheels.  Junkyards are  useful, if you know how to judge good parts,
but it's the very opposite of a well-curated repository of solutions.
Gems may be hidden among the trash, like a lost Rembrandt found among
the deritus of Sunday painters, but there is no classification by
value. Also (unlike physical junk stores) there's little pleasure
involved in browsing through a heap of such solutions.  Since there is
obvious pleasure in making new solutions, the craftsman itch leads to
more premature releases, and so the cycle continues."

Discovery, documentation and quality assurances go a long way to
tipping the balance towards using an external module, and systems like
LR/LD reduce the deployment cost. (LR is not everyone's cup of tea,
but then many (if not most) Lua users don't use it as a standalone
application/scripting language.)

steve d.