Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (work3) now available

[Alex Szpakowski <aszpakowski@...>]

Coroutines wrote
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 3:59 PM, Alex Szpakowski <

> aszpakowski@

> > wrote:
> 
>> The core math library's goal isn't and shouldn't be to cover all use
>> cases
>> of math in programming, or to cover the specific use cases of a vocal
>> minority.
> 
> All the Lua community is -- is a bunch of vocal minorities.  There is
> no majority, and any desire in any direction is contended and avoided
> to keep Lua "lean".  Everybody makes a wheel and you can never find 4
> matching ones to make a car.
> 
> PS: I wish the math lib were an optional require, not "pre-required".

The direction of Lua is not determined by the contributors to this mailing
list, it's determined by the authors of Lua (who also happen to use this
mailing list.)

Because the mailing list has such a comparatively small active user base, a
few people with strong opinions who post many times tend to give the lion's
share of input on the list, even though they don't necessarily have the same
goals in mind for Lua as a whole as its authors do.

There are a few math-related operations that are used in most programming
problems (and thus in most codebases) in one form or another. It was pointed
out a while ago that those math operations generally fall into the same
bucket as what a typical student learns in grade school. From what I
understand, Lua's authors evaluated the math library and removed the few
functions which didn't fit into that category.

There are obviously a huge amount of domain-specific math operations which
aren't included in that list - for example, I use vector and matrix math
with Lua every day, but I don't expect a standard math library from a
language with Lua's philosophies to include a function to compute the
inverse of a matrix. Nor do I expect it to have hyperbolic functions, which
I have never used or needed to use in grade school, university, or
programming. Just as many other programmers have never needed to compute the
inverse of a matrix.



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