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From:
Stefano
Sent: Thursday, February 25, 2016 5:54 PM: >On 25 Feb 2016 11:15, "Viacheslav Usov" <via.usov@gmail.com>
wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 9:18 AM, Dirk Laurie
<dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > I have the perception that >90% of the rocks available on
the primary repository provide modules and <10% provide applications, and the
suspicion that 10% is a very generous estimate.
>>
>> Given that Lua is officially an "extension language", the scarcity
of all-Lua applications should hardly be surprising.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> V.
>>
>> [1] "Lua is an extension programming language [...], Lua has no
notion of a "main" program: it only works embedded in a host client, called the
embedding program or simply the host." - http://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html
To me, this seems like a case of unfortunate ‘marketing’ strategy from the
Lua team... :(
People (new to Lua) in search of a general purpose scripting language are
driven away right at that statement (“it only works embedded...”)! They
won’t even bother to read the next few sentences...
Further down it reads: “The Lua distribution includes a
sample host program called
lua, which uses the Lua library to offer a
complete, standalone Lua interpreter, for interactive or batch
use.”Well, calling it a ‘sample’ implies not for real work but for toying around
with the language. It could be made clearer that this official stand alone
interpreter is powerful enough for a whole range of apps, like practically all
command-line utilities, while offering a great degree of implicit portability to
all platforms with a Lua interpreter.
I feel this introduction in the Lua manual could be made clearer to help
keep the right people continue reading, while politely sending the rest to
greener pastures.
(On the other hand, people coming from embedded systems programming,
are ‘misled’ to think this is a language specifically designed for embedded
systems – and usually for the smaller low-memory ones. Wrong again.
But they figure it out after a while.)
This is certainly a more successful approach.
>Having personally used it with success in the latter scenario I find it
unhelpful that no effort is spent in pursuing further that direction.
>Probably most people interested in that have already moved on.
I too use Lua as a stand-alone language with great success, and recommend
it to others for that purpose. It’s ideal for a whole range of apps –
mostly command-line utilities for now (only because of lack of
standardized GUI libraries). If an app can be done with Lua, I
certainly prefer it to using Python, for example.
>Stefano
Tony
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