Re: Awesome-Lua on Hacker News

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Monday, August 18, 2014, steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 2:34 PM, Ryan Pusztai <rpusztai@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I use penlight everyday and it is my one requirement for all my apps. I am
> > not sure where that person is coming from.
>
> Thanks Ryan - never take the internet personally....
>
> BTW, PL is always open to suggestions, bugs and PRs.  As well as any
> general pointers for further directions....
>
> Back on topic, it seems that this curated-list thing meets a need; we
> were hoping that some machinery will evolve around MoonRocks so that
> people could rate projects just like on Pierre's
> https://lua-toolbox.com/.
>
> steve d.

I echo Ryan. PL is special to me for another reason:

At the time that I was introduced to Lua, I sought out the "must have" libraries. Those don't exist, but PL seemed closest. 

As a library, it's fine and since I don't have any history with Perl, I didn't find the choices made to be at all relevant. 

The. Most. Important. Feature of PL was the documentation. It was relatively complete by FOSS standards and  the narrative portions provided a good dose of the thinking behind the design. 

Narrative / conversational prose is so often discouraged from technical manuals, in favor of sticking to only auto-generated API documentation with, if you are lucky, topic-centric, paragraph-sized sentences. Tutorials, walk-throughs, etc are for blogs.

PL's object system does need help. It is broken, if you use class properties. I've posted issues on this, but they look more like feature requests and I think that is because:

1: the object system in PL could benefit from some breaking changes. 

2: perhaps object systems are best left hand made and ad-hoc. At most, pl might provide some common utility templates for objects, but beyond that,

Meh. 

I've posted a few suggestions (and a patch) for pretty.write. I've found that looping tables (stack overflows) can be an issue if the objects use unique metatables and I still maintain a fork that provides a mechanism to exclude certain keys, but i don't think that approach is ideal. It's probably better to make a filter factory that receives an include/exclude key list... Or something.

Anyway, in short: documentation great. Love PL. Thanks! 

-Andrew