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Hello everyone,
I just wanted to point out what appears to be a very interesting trend in the Lua community: Lua applications are quietly and slowly, but surely, entering the arena of end-user applications. Of course, for at least 10-15 years Lua has been immensely popular, but that was only as glue language and as an embedded language, with hundreds/thousands of scripts being used all over the world.
But what about end-user programs? I am particularly interested in minimalist programs and I remember looking for minimalist Lua-based programs a few years ago, and barely finding any. That was odd, as I was expecting for find lots of small end-user programs written in Lua, which is itself minimalist. I was rather disappointed.
But now, things seem to have changed. Hopefully there is a new trend coming up.
WordGrinder [1], a nice Lua-based console word-processor, was a pioneer among small Lua programs for the average end-user. It has been around for quite some time, and it is still developed.
More recently I discovered lumail [2], a minimalist console-based email client scripted in Lua (along the lines of mutt and and of the Ruby-based sup).
And now I see the file manager CFM [3] which, as mentioned in a recent message, consists of a single Lua file!
I am overwhelmed and overjoyed.
These late developments are really encouraging. I do hope that this trend continues, with new simple end-user applications being created, so we will be able to dump a lot of those bloated and slow programs that are currently the only choice available.
Bye
Carlito
[1] http://wordgrinder.sourceforge.net
[2] http://www.lumail.org