Re: Lua Team - The Legacy

[Steve Litt <slitt@...>]

On Sat, 23 Mar 2019 10:11:26 +0100
Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@tiscali.it> wrote:

> On 22/03/2019 16:25, Italo Maia wrote:
[snip]
> >
> > One thing that I would like to know more is about is if there are
> > plans for the language growth and legacy. Big companies usually
> > have to prepare people to take over positions when they become
> > vacant by any reason (company needs more people for that task or
> > the person fall sick or retired).
> >
> > Are there plans for Lua to have more core developers or a guidance
> > for new core developers? Like, "if you plan to become a developer
> > of the language, this should be your mindset and compromises".

[snip]

> 
> I had thought about that for a while, too.
> 
> I've always thought that the open-source/close-development model used
> by Lua team has, together with many advantages (e.g. no
> design-by-committee bloat), some serious drawbacks: what you are
> talking about is one, IMO.

I like the non-Democratic way Lua development works. As you say, no
design by committee. In addition, not a week goes by when somebody
doesn't champion yet another change to the Lua language. And a whole
bunch of people agree. And the email thread goes on for days. And most
of these suggestions are edge case stuff easily accomplished with just
a few lines of the current Lua language. And Lua doesn't need syntactic
sugar: Nothing in Lua is particularly cumbersome.

Additions and changes aren't free. They typically add more nooks and
crannies where bugs can hang out. They have an alternative cost of Lua
developers developing something really important not already there (I
don't know what that could be) or fixing bugs. And last but not least,
I'd prefer not to add alternatives that I need to learn in order to
work with Other Peoples' Code.

Continuing, Lua's strong point is it's a minimalistic language. Last
time I looked hard (5.1), there were exactly two complex datatypes:
Table and Metatable, and you could do *anything* with those two. What a
breath of fresh air that is. Why people want to add more geegaws to
such an exquisitely succinct language is beyond me.

Fortunately, with the current non-democratic development paradigm,
those requesting features can go on for a week or so, have their
say, and nothing comes of it. Mainly because they didn't have enough
skin in the game to do most of the development themselves. They could
have made and distributed a patch, and if it were widely used perhaps
it would have ended up in the distribution. They could have developed a
Lua-only include file to fulfill the need, put it on their own website,
problem solved, and here again, if popular, it might become part of the
Lua curated libraries. They could have forked Lua. That's the ultimate
guarantee of freedom in Free Software, especially useful if the
project loses touch (which it hasn't).

In summary, 90%+ of those asking for enhancements aren't aware of the
cost of their request, so it's a good thing the developers don't scurry
to implement them.

The question was asked what to do when Roberto retires. Same thing as
any other Free Software project directed by a maintainer: He appoints a
competent successor, or else may the best fork win.

SteveT