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On 03-Feb-20 18:04, Coda Highland wrote:
Non-programmers shouldn't even be expected to install Lua, much less LuaRocks. Applications on Windows are expected to ship their own dependencies. This calls for a packager, and these already exist.If you instead mean people who aren't experienced programmers that find themselves with a need to work with Lua code regardless, we have to consider the use case. I would imagine that the majority of the time they're going to be working with Lua embedded into another application, which makes binary distributions of anything generic less helpful.
I was also thinking of hobbysts / tinkerers, that make a non-trivial percentage of python users, perhaps on the way to become professional programmers. They run some script and they just want to change a line or two.
Also, with the couple of Lua-based open-source applications I published I found out that most Windows users have trouble even setting a path and writing things correctly on a command line. So, the easiest, the better.
I think Python is successful despite its shortcomings because, apart from the bandwagon effect: - It can be installed and used immediately. If you need a module, you just import it.
- It is mostly used as Basic-like glue language between libraries.Most users do not install Python because they consider it an interesting language, but because they want to use (e.g.) OpenCV, or do some very simple scripting, or to set up a mini-server for some testing, without having to read more than a few lines of documentation.
Very few users choose a language for its intrinsic value.
Also, many programmers are not willing to install a C compiler on
Windows and to spend hours or days to make it all work, especially when
Python installs just fine (well, almost, but there is Anaconda
Distribution for advanced users).
It should be pretty straightforward for a LuaRocks Windows distribution
to include a C compiler that's already configured appropriately. This
shouldn't be considered an obstacle.
It shouldn't, but I suspect it could not be as easy as it sounds. I'll be glad to be proven wrong.
-- Enrico