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On 29/01/2020 17:20, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:
On a recent thread ("Dead Batteries" ) I argued that Lua lost terrain over Python. I won't bother anyone repeating what I already said, but I stumbled on this article which may explain something: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/python-is-eating-the-world-how-one-developers-side-project-became-the-hottest-programming-language-on-the-planet/1970: PL/I will be the language to rule them all. 1980: Ada will be the language to rule them all. (1990: C++ will be the language to rule them all.) 2000: Java will be the language to rule them all. 2010: JavaScript will be the language to rule them all. 2020: Python will be the language to rule them all. The dogs bark, the caravan marches on. -- Roberto
Probably I didn't made my point clear. My reasoning is spread among several posts.
I didn't try to say:"Python is hype => Python is a very good language => Python is going to rule them all => Lua is not good."
I pointed out that some years ago Python knowledge was on par with Lua's, whereas Lua is not even on the radar now.
(BTW, Hype /is/ a relevant market force, big companies have gone broke for lack of good marketing at the right time).
And this is something Lua community and Lua team should be aware of, IMO.This is not about "ruling them all" (this is fanboy reasoning, which I wouldn't care less). I wouldn't want Lua to "rule them all". What I would like is to find a Lua library for most tasks I need to perform that works out of the box, without hassles (as Lua, the language, does). I.e. what Java did ~15 years ago (when I was a professional programmer) and what seems Python is doing now.
This is about becoming irrelevant in the general purpose languages landscape. This could mean: less people interested, hence less resources (libraries/programs/expertise) available (especially on the open-source/free category).
IIRC (please correct me if I'm wrong) you once stated that Lua team wanted Lua to become more widespread also as a GP PL (in the embedding world it seems it still has an edge, for now).
That SO survey show only relative figures, and I'm not into PL statistics, so I can't cite other sources (maybe you can?), but judging by those results, it appears Lua has lost a lot of terrain.
BTW, of the languages you cite (besides Python), C++, Java and Javascript all still appear on the SO survey, and in the top 10 ranks. Lua doesn't even hit the ~1% mark of WebAssembly, sadly.
Cheers! -- Lorenzo