Re: Batteries

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2018-03-11 23:03 GMT+02:00 Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@majumdar.org.uk>:
> On 11 March 2018 at 20:21, Gregg Reynolds <dev@mobileink.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Mar 11, 2018 10:08 AM, "Marc Balmer" <marc@msys.ch> wrote:
>> ...
>>
>> I truly love Lua the way it is.
>>
>>
>> +2
>>
>
> Problem is you misunderstand the proposal. Nobody is taking anything
> away. The proposal is to have an extended library outside of Lua that
> is 'blessed' by the Lua team, and managed by community leaders. Are
> you still objecting to this?

And who are those community leaders? You may find "able", you may find
"willing", but you are not going to find "able and willing".

The "blessed by the Lua team" bit is not going to fly, any more than
Donald Knuth blessed LaTeX or ConTeXt. [1] They provide a lean and
lithe Lua that runs on any platform, and that last bit is more than
you can say about almost any other language of comparable power. It's
quite enough for one three-man team doing a labour of love. [2]

That extended library will also have to run on any platform. That's
why I suggested an acid test: it has to build not with its own snazzy
Makefile while perched on its own rock, but in the same environment
that the minimal standard library builds in.

One other thing: we do NOT want C libraries disguised as Lua code.
Bindings that refer you to the docs of Debian package libbullshit etc.
That's my problem with many of these so-called batteries on LuaRocks.
Even lcurl, which I use a lot. How on earth can you expect people who
design Lua not to be disgusted by a bloated interface like that?

[1] He said kind words about LaTeX but himself never used it.
Actually, LuaTeX is a good example of a "batteries included" Lua.
[2] Speaking of Love, that too is quite a nice little
batteries-included Lua. Like LuaTex, no interactive interpreter
supplied. Makes one think …