Why nobody talks about Lua
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Why nobody talks about Lua
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Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#2It seem to me that Lua usage reside primary in the game industry.
People who works in the game industry and people who works in web technologies rarely collide with each other.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#3It seem to me that Lua usage reside primary in the game industry. People who works in the game industry and people who works in web technologies rarely collide with each other.
It's a shame that it's mostly being used for games. It's got incredible flexibility and power and even the mainline runtime (sans JIT) is surprisingly performant. More people should give it a try.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#4Lua is used a lot, but usually as a command and control language. Meaning that it is always used together with another language/system, where performance matters, both for runtime and development time, and memory constrains..
One of the the reasons that it hasn't caught on the server side is that the server engineers are lazy (in the friendly way), and have it easy. If you have performance problems, you can just throw more hardware to it. So Python is a decent choice, plus the lots of libraries/batteries included, make the life easy to lazy developers. Again, by lazy, I mean people that just want to use the stuff to create features, and not worry about fundamental stuff. The fun stuff is usually in large dataset processing scaling, database scaling, etc. where a single box is not the bottleneck.
But for mobile dev., python is just too much of a pig. I think lua will win when these devs. start moving to the server side. Mobile / embeded devs have to re-invent the wheel often, and are just use to it, so they are less lazy by definition (they are more likeley to just create a framework from scratch, then just use things that are already there).
But the current trend is the opposite, as more server guys are moving to client/mobile. There is more growth in the client/mobile side, so there is not much cross pollination going on upstairs.
Smart devs. are either solving interesting problems below in the embeded world, or above in large scale datasets. The middle stack (your average crud app), is left with more average types.
Since it takes a brave soul to start with a great language, which unfortunately doesn't have all the libraries that some more mature languages do, Lua hasn't found that great of usage yet in the server side.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#5It seem to me that Lua usage reside primary in the game industry. People who works in the game industry and people who works in web technologies rarely collide with each other.
It's a shame that it's mostly being used for games. It's got incredible flexibility and power and even the mainline runtime (sans JIT) is surprisingly performant. More people should give it a try.
Python and Ruby largely continue the class-based object oriented model and are thus easy to pick up if you come from a C++/Java background. While JavaScript is prototype-based, and thus somewhat exotic, it at least maintains the syntactic heritage of C/C++, so it's not as scary as it otherwise might be for beginners. Plus most in the web development background have already known the language for years.
Perhaps the reason Lua isn't gaining ground in the web scene is because it's too exotic, however fair that might be. It has a foreign object model and a different syntax. Both of these combined might create the perception that it's difficult to learn.
I'm not sure though. For me, I've always been interested in Lua, but I've never picked it up because I never see any web apps made with it.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#6It seem to me that Lua usage reside primary in the game industry. People who works in the game industry and people who works in web technologies rarely collide with each other.
Lua was used in the original Hulk movie game demo, which made it very easy to hack, and thus, actually fun to play.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#7Much of Adobe Lightroom is written in it, right?
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#8Roberto Ierusalimschy, PontifÃcia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janro, is the author of Lua and also author of several excellent books about Lua. Lua is a very nice language with a small footprint, powerful structure, and a fascinating and flexible object model.
Roberto is scheduled to speak about Lua at Stanford in the Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium from 4:15-5:30 in Gates B01. As is usual for the Colloquium, the talk will be webcast live and available for delayed viewing, on demand, over the web. Anyone who wants can attend live. See the Colloquium website for details: http://e380.stanford.edu.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#9Because the arrays start at 1.
Re: Why nobody talks about Lua
#10> Yet when you look at what Lua's actually done and been used for in the industry it certainly seems disproportionate to the eerie silence
Never hear about Bink! video player either although I see it's used in every game I play.
Also, I hear about Lua quit a bit.