Re: TechRepublic article about languages to avoid in 2018

[Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@...>]

On 10 March 2018 at 10:41, Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@tiscali.it> wrote:
> On 10/03/2018 07:33, Dirk Laurie wrote:
>>
>> 2018-03-09 22:53 GMT+02:00 Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@majumdar.org.uk>:
>>>
>>>
>>> I think you are mistaken. In fact, Lua is maintained by one man
>>> (Roberto) whereas LuaJIT has regular and sometimes large contributions
>>> from external contributors.
>>
>>
>> May I recommend the book "Masterminds of Programming" by Federico
>> Biancuzzi and Shane Warden (O'Reilly 2009, e-book available) which
>> inter alia features an interview with Roberto and Luiz, from which
>> I'll quote one paragraph.
>>
>> Interviewer: How do you share development responsibilities—in
>> particular, writing code?
>>
>> Luiz: The first versions of Lua were coded by Waldemar in 1993. Since
>> around 1995, Roberto has written and maintained the bulk of the code.
>> I’m responsible for a small part of the code: the bytecode dump/undump
>> modules and the standalone compiler, luac. We have always done code
>> revisions and sent suggestions by email to the others about changes to
>> the code, and we have long meetings about new features and their
>> implementation.
>>
>>
> This doesn't change the gist of what Dibyendu said. *Most* of Lua is
> maintained by one man (and development in general is done by two).
>

Okay here is my understanding.

Roberto pretty much is the sole developer of pretty much all of Lua
except the two bits mentioned above - don't believe that has changed
since 1995. You can do the maths in terms of percentage share.

Roberto maintains the bug list I think.

Luiz maintains the website, mailing list etc. Also the luac tool and
the dump/undump features in Lua, as mentioned above.

I don't believe any code is taken from anyone not even students.

I only pointed this out as folks comparing Lua and LuaJIT often
complain how LuaJIT is a one man show etc etc. In fact the two
projects are entirely similarly run when it comes to the core
codebase, with LuaJIT recently taking more external contributions.

Regards
Dibyendu