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Awesome-lua: A curated list of Lua packages and resources

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Re: Awesome-lua: A curated list of Lua packages and resources

#31

Post by pinkyand »

walterbell wrote: post #30
pinkyand wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the way to judge curation is by comparing curation+search to search alone. With good curation effort, i think that curation+search is a winner , at a relatively minor cost(needing more time). Also curation has the benefit of being a useful discovery tool.

In theory, https://www.openhub.net/p?r&q=lua could construct/curate such lists from project activity analytics.

Personally i think human curation is much better than curation by activity analytics, and it can offer better context.

Re: Awesome-lua: A curated list of Lua packages and resources

#32

Post by castell »

walterbell wrote: post #11
LewisJEllis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author/maintainer here - Thanks for the kind words! Lua's nature is definitely a bit prohibitive to a tight community, so part of my intention with this list is to provide an overview of what's out there. As far as penlight goes - feel free to open an issue or PR to discuss any inclusions/exclusions. I haven't actually used it myself, but as a fan of microlight I decided to include the big brother. Everything can be…

> Lua's nature is definitely a bit prohibitive to a tight community Is that for technical reasons or because Lua is commonly used in proprietary apps?

The Lua language and LuaJIT are great.

The user base is fragmented (version 4, 5.1 (LuaJIT) vs 5.2), as Lua is usually used as embedded language (alongside C, C++, ...) for video games (World of Warcraft, Far Cry, ...), applications (Adobe Lightroom, ...), etc.

And the http://lua.org website is a bit too minimalistic to offer community features. The project only hosts a mailing list and a old-school wiki. The additional libraries are/were hosted on http://luaforge.net , an outdated sourceforge clone. The documentation is static and the development process itself is not so open. The Lua language standard library is lacking functions almost every other language ship with their default package (so everyone has to either find & download additional libraries or reinvent the wheel).

Other languages like PHP have a documentation that allows the community to add comments and code samples.

Re: Awesome-lua: A curated list of Lua packages and resources

#34

Post by walterbell »

pinkyand wrote: post #31
walterbell wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, https://www.openhub.net/p?r&q=lua could construct/curate such lists from project activity analytics.

Personally i think human curation is much better than curation by activity analytics, and it can offer better context.

No question. But it usually doesn't last, as people move onto other projects. Even within this thread, the new list is replacing a similarly named, now unmaintained list.

DMOZ/Wikipedia at least try to provide long-term continuity and a standardized ontology for discovery. This github list is depending on the searcher already knowing that they should preface their dev discovery queries with "awesome".

If this list format were standardized, it could be dynamically merged with data from OpenHub. Or GitHub could add analytics features (similar to OpenHub) to assist the human curator editing this GitHub repo.

Re: Awesome-lua: A curated list of Lua packages and resources

#35

Post by dayveec »

tjkells wrote: post #2

Can we PLEASE not refer people to penlight anymore? It's half broken, poorly documented, and poorly maintained. It drives me crazy to see it referred to all over the place as a good example of anything. That being said, this is FANTASTIC. Due to the nature of lua it may well always lack a good community but thankfully people seem to be trying.

Why do you say that? WRT doco it's one of the better Lua libraries.

Re: Awesome-lua: A curated list of Lua packages and resources

#36

Post by walterbell »

castell wrote: post #32
walterbell wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lua's nature is definitely a bit prohibitive to a tight community Is that for technical reasons or because Lua is commonly used in proprietary apps?

The Lua language and LuaJIT are great. The user base is fragmented (version 4, 5.1 (LuaJIT) vs 5.2), as Lua is usually used as embedded language (alongside C, C++, ...) for video games (World of Warcraft, Far Cry, ...), applications (Adobe Lightroom, ...), etc. And the http://lua.org website is a bit too minimalistic to offer community features. The project only hosts a mailing list and a old-school wiki. The additio…

If someone created a community site with editable docs, do you think it would gain traction?

Re: Awesome-lua: A curated list of Lua packages and resources

#37

Post by J_Darnley »

LewisJEllis wrote: post #27
J_Darnley wrote: post #24

Your list of section anchor links appears to be broken. I click on any and nothing happens. Otherwise I look forward to browsing it.

Hm, they work fine for me; can you be more specific?

How can I be more specific than "I click on any and nothing happens"? The links must point to non-existent anchors in the page. I'll go have a quick look at the source but I don't know what it can tell me.

Re: Awesome-lua: A curated list of Lua packages and resources

#38

Post by pinkyand »

walterbell wrote: post #34
pinkyand wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally i think human curation is much better than curation by activity analytics, and it can offer better context.

No question. But it usually doesn't last, as people move onto other projects. Even within this thread, the new list is replacing a similarly named, now unmaintained list. DMOZ/Wikipedia at least try to provide long-term continuity and a standardized ontology for discovery. This github list is depending on the searcher already knowing that they should preface their dev discovery queries with "awesome". If this list fo…

This list replaces a centralized list. Maybe with the magic of git this will work better. Or maybe we need better community building and connection around such list.

But since such a knowledge source is highly useful for people, and very valuable and people could get lots of credit for helping(in theory), i could see something like this built up.

On the other hand comparing just the current list(5 days of operation) , with the best openhub or github search could offer for the queries "python cryptography" and "python xml", i don't think analytics alone should do. But sure analytics can(and are through Google/Github) being used to guide curators.

Re: Awesome-lua: A curated list of Lua packages and resources

#39

Post by catwell »

tjkells wrote: post #2

Can we PLEASE not refer people to penlight anymore? It's half broken, poorly documented, and poorly maintained. It drives me crazy to see it referred to all over the place as a good example of anything. That being said, this is FANTASTIC. Due to the nature of lua it may well always lack a good community but thankfully people seem to be trying.

I disagree strongly with that.

Penlight is the closest thing there is to a Lua standard library (loosely modeled after what exists in Python). It is maintained by Steve Donovan who is one of the most active members of the community and the author of http://www.luafaq.org/, LDoc and lake.

Having contributed to Penlight myself I can say it is certainly not poorly maintained compared to most other Lua projects.

I agree, Penlight is not the best at everything it does, and it probably does too much (which is why there is microlight), but it is still a tool most Lua users need to know about.

Re: Awesome-lua: A curated list of Lua packages and resources

#40

Post by catwell »

walterbell wrote: post #15

Why isn't a search engine sufficient for discovering packages and resources? Historically, human-edited lists don't have a long archival lifetime, e.g. original Yahoo, DMOZ, Mahalo. If curation is better than search, why is a curated list better hosted at github than Wikipedia, which has a lower technical cost of editing? If the problem is Wikipedia moderation, who will reconcile multiple github curated lists? Is the…

For what it's worth, I wrote https://lua-toolbox.com/ (a website referencing all Lua rocks which users can endorse).

A search engine will allow you to discover tools you are looking for, but sometimes you do not know exactly what to search. There are way fewer Lua modules than e.g. Python or Ruby libraries so exhaustive lists are still manageable.

Also, sometimes you want to know what people are actually using. A bit of "social proof" is always good when you are looking for Open Source libraries.

There is more to say about this and the Lua modules ecosystem, which is why I gave an entire talk about that topic at Lua Workshop last year http://files.catwell.info/presentations/2013-11-lua-workshop... :)

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