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Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video

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Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video

#11

Post by jacques_chester »

benatkin wrote: post #7
jacques_chester wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I just missing some information in this regard? A major, and non-negotiable, design goal of Lua is that it targets the ANSI C environment to maximise portability. ANSI C does not define Unicode support. Incidentally, those two libraries might be unchanged because they're stable. The rate of change in the main lua implementation is quite measured.

The Lua philosophy is far different from the philosophy of other languages. That's why videos like these, that cover the advantages before the tradeoffs, are a good thing. Knowing the positive things about something really effects my perceptions of the tradeoffs. Also, Unicode is an odd thing to consider to be an essential part of a programming language. Usually when I hear it I think the person must think it's a par…

> Also, Unicode is an odd thing to consider to be an essential part of a programming language.

It really depends on what the language is used for. Web-facing applications are, in general, going to received unicode input, so for them it matters. But for an embedded programmer, for example, it might be utterly irrelevant.

Horses for courses, really. It just so happens that Lua has other properties that are very attractive to web apps too, which the presentation outlined.

-- and yes, still alive and commenting :P

Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video

#12

Post by arkx »

benatkin wrote: post #7
jacques_chester wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I just missing some information in this regard? A major, and non-negotiable, design goal of Lua is that it targets the ANSI C environment to maximise portability. ANSI C does not define Unicode support. Incidentally, those two libraries might be unchanged because they're stable. The rate of change in the main lua implementation is quite measured.

The Lua philosophy is far different from the philosophy of other languages. That's why videos like these, that cover the advantages before the tradeoffs, are a good thing. Knowing the positive things about something really effects my perceptions of the tradeoffs. Also, Unicode is an odd thing to consider to be an essential part of a programming language. Usually when I hear it I think the person must think it's a par…

As a Finnish software dev I can say that in these days native support for Unicode is a must. We have a couple of special characters in the alphabet (åäö) and if you have to do a lot of manual work to use these, the programming language is pretty much unusable for real world stuff that involves any use of Finnish.

The fact that Ruby took so long to get real Unicode support is due to Japanese resisting Unicode in favor of their own encodings, EUC-JP and Shift JIS, just like Finnish used to cling to ISO-8859-1(5) for so long.

Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video

#15

Post by silentbicycle »

netghost wrote: post #13

I'd say lua is great, well good, it's just that it's entirely reasonable, which makes it kind of boring ;) It as been the least surprising language I've used.

There's deep stuff there (look into coroutines and metatables), but Lua has been carefully designed so that it doesn't get in the way. If all you want from Lua is a (JSON-like) format for data dumps or config files, you can safely ignore the rest of the language. It's like the opposite of C++ that way. :)

Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video

#16

Post by indigoviolet »

jacques_chester wrote: post #5
indigoviolet wrote: post #3

I haven't seen the video [do they discuss this?], but the biggest problem I have with Lua is its lack of good unicode support. The Lua wiki suggests slnunicode and ICU4Lua, but neither library has been updated for a year. I'd love to use Lua instead of Python for some tasks, given that LuaJIT kicks ass. But poor support for something as important as unicode is a deal breaker. Am I just missing some information in thi…

> Am I just missing some information in this regard? A major, and non-negotiable, design goal of Lua is that it targets the ANSI C environment to maximise portability. ANSI C does not define Unicode support. Incidentally, those two libraries might be unchanged because they're stable. The rate of change in the main lua implementation is quite measured.

slnunicode hasn't changed or been updated, and has no forum posts or bugs since 2006 [http://luaforge.net/projects/sln/]

ICU4Lua hasn't been touched since April 2009, and is at 0.2B. [http://luaforge.net/projects/icu-lua/]

That sort of status just doesn't inspire confidence in a language. I understand you can use it for game programming, or that you can write your own libraries for it, but that sort of thing doesn't encourage adoption.

Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video

#17

Post by silentbicycle »

indigoviolet wrote: post #16
jacques_chester wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I just missing some information in this regard? A major, and non-negotiable, design goal of Lua is that it targets the ANSI C environment to maximise portability. ANSI C does not define Unicode support. Incidentally, those two libraries might be unchanged because they're stable. The rate of change in the main lua implementation is quite measured.

slnunicode hasn't changed or been updated, and has no forum posts or bugs since 2006 [ http://luaforge.net/projects/sln/ ] ICU4Lua hasn't been touched since April 2009, and is at 0.2B. [ http://luaforge.net/projects/icu-lua/ ] That sort of status just doesn't inspire confidence in a language. I understand you can use it for game programming, or that you can write your own libraries for it, but that sort of thing does…

ICU4Lua is a wrapper for an existing, stable library. Does (for example) the Python wrapper for sqlite get a lot of commits these days? And if not, does that make it dead and abandoned?

Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video

#18

Post by indigoviolet »

metamemetics wrote: post #8
indigoviolet wrote: post #3

I haven't seen the video [do they discuss this?], but the biggest problem I have with Lua is its lack of good unicode support. The Lua wiki suggests slnunicode and ICU4Lua, but neither library has been updated for a year. I'd love to use Lua instead of Python for some tasks, given that LuaJIT kicks ass. But poor support for something as important as unicode is a deal breaker. Am I just missing some information in thi…

http://luaforge.net/projects/ul-str/ Last updated June 21st 2010. Readme seems to indicate it supports all the important stuff like compare, concatenate, encode, lower upper, Regexp, url escaping. Says beta and I haven't tried it yet tho : /

Thanks, that's useful to hear. It isn't on the wiki page: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaUnicode (which hasn't been touched since Sep 2009).

Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video

#19

Post by silentbicycle »

arkx wrote: post #12
benatkin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Lua philosophy is far different from the philosophy of other languages. That's why videos like these, that cover the advantages before the tradeoffs, are a good thing. Knowing the positive things about something really effects my perceptions of the tradeoffs. Also, Unicode is an odd thing to consider to be an essential part of a programming language. Usually when I hear it I think the person must think it's a par…

As a Finnish software dev I can say that in these days native support for Unicode is a must. We have a couple of special characters in the alphabet (åäö) and if you have to do a lot of manual work to use these, the programming language is pretty much unusable for real world stuff that involves any use of Finnish. The fact that Ruby took so long to get real Unicode support is due to Japanese resisting Unicode in favor…

Is Unicode something that needs to be in the core of a language, or is it sufficient to leave it to libraries, if the language's design doesn't prevent it?

On this computer (OpenBSD/i386), icu has over 1 MB of libraries and a 15 MB data file. The whole Lua distribution fits in one 200k library. Bloating the core language with that seems impractical.

Re: Lua Doesn't Suck – Strange Loop 2010 20-minute talk video

#20

Post by indigoviolet »

silentbicycle wrote: post #17
indigoviolet wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

slnunicode hasn't changed or been updated, and has no forum posts or bugs since 2006 [ http://luaforge.net/projects/sln/ ] ICU4Lua hasn't been touched since April 2009, and is at 0.2B. [ http://luaforge.net/projects/icu-lua/ ] That sort of status just doesn't inspire confidence in a language. I understand you can use it for game programming, or that you can write your own libraries for it, but that sort of thing does…

ICU4Lua is a wrapper for an existing, stable library. Does (for example) the Python wrapper for sqlite get a lot of commits these days? And if not, does that make it dead and abandoned?

Why is it in beta? Why does the mailing list [http://lists.luaforge.net/pipermail/icu-lua-users/] have no activity on it?
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