[Lua's authors can speak for themselves, but I believe the following statements WRT Lua author's opinions are common knowledge within this mailing list. Where I've misrepresented something, I accept responsibility and welcome corrections.]
1. Author's Interest in setting/maintaining batteries
Maintaining an ecosystem/set of batteries is not a goal of Lua's authors. They are not against it, but they do not want it to be their job to be directly involved in it. They also want it to be clear that something like this is not Lua, but an optional/independent layer on top of Lua.
Someone / some organization is going to need to lead this, in mild coordination with team Lua, only to make sure the boundaries are set.
2. Author's Interest in Marketing / Evangelizing
Having the right set of libraries is not enough, as we all know. Lua must be in people's faces, as Lua (not as WoW or Roblox's scripting language). Team Lua has published excellent papers in the ACM[1], but this kind of activity is not the same thing as what is needed here.
To me, Evangelizing/Marketing efficiently means:
* Identify the key attributes that make Lua uniquely attractive.
- Embeddable design: threading profile, low/no dependancies, integrates well with any concurrency model, configurable garbage collection, MIT license
- Small size
- Language sophistication and simplicity: concurrency becomes easy, complex data structures are simpler, it's very easy to create abstractions in the language, etc...
- ...
* Identifying the best targets for adoption, which includes anything that must scale, is time-constrained, or requires a very small footprint:
- IoT
- Media/Broadcast/ProAV
- Gaming
- Robotics
- ...
* Creating more chances for that target audience to become aware of Lua and its unique capabilities
- What tradeshows do these manufacturers and developers go to? Can we arrange speaking engagements?
- Who are the decision-makers within these organizations?
* Governance
- Electing decision-makers
- Hosting regular meetings
- Setting priorities
- Raising money to support marketing activities and development.
- Holding people accountable
- Running a Lua Conference
- Doing all the dumb things you have to do in order to get real work done with people that different motivations, opinions, etc
I think that this Governance is an important part of this. Otherwise, we're going to need to wait until a sufficiently charismatic developer finds the passion and time to do it on their own and convinces enough of the right people to go along with them. Chances are good that whoever that person is, they'll have their own opinions about how Lua should be viewed and what it's good for. It may have nothing to do with what any of us thinks or it may be someone here who gets it just right.
As much as we may dislike institutions, governance, asking for money and putting up with bull-crap, it may be an essential part of organizing people's efforts. It also beats repeating the same threads about the lack of batteries or waiting for a savior to come.
