Re: Stackoverflow 2018 survey

[Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@...>]

On 15 March 2018 at 11:43, steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> My understanding is that PUC Lua team is like Linux kernel team -
> building the basis for userland to do the rest. Torvalds certainly has
> opinions about userland (e.g. his fights with Gnome) but he is not
> part of its decision making.
>

Am not sure this is a good comparison. Firstly because Linus operates
a completely different model of development which is based on
hierarchy of trusted maintainers. Secondly because there are big
companies doing the rest.

Lack of popularity for Lua is not necessarily a problem, as long as
Lua is strong in its niche and lacks a competitor. If a competitor
arrives in that niche, then the situation will be different. As we
have seen several times, no technology is sacrosanct (not sure that is
the word I am looking for) - you are only good until something better
comes along. Lua is fortunate that the only serious competitor -
LuaJIT - has given up on the contest.

Personally for general scripting I find Python is better as it is
possible to do virtually anything without too much effort. I hardly
know Python, but when I recently needed a cross platform test harness,
I decided to use Python and it was surprisingly easy to write one (see
https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/dmr_c/blob/master/tests/runtests.py).

There are other issues such as user friendliness; as a language Python
is more user friendly.

Lua's strength / niche is its small size and power despite the size. I
think this needs to be maintained, but supplemented by a larger
standard library external to core Lua, so that general purpose users
have a better experience.

Regards
Dibyendu