On Tue, 23 Jul 2013 11:29:32 +0200, Konstantin Khomoutov
<flatw...@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
On Tue, 23 Jul 2013 11:03:09 +0200
"j. van den hoff" <veedeeh...@googlemail.com> wrote:
[...]
>> While the Lua scripting enabled me to gain a level of
>> sophistication and relative rigor in the process more than what I
>> could get from normal UNIX
>> plumbing, if my project wasn’t in Lua in the first place, I found
>> it breaking my concentration a good deal more than I would have
>> liked.
>
> That's my impression of lua, though i haven't worked with it (it's
> too weird, both at the script and C API level).
really? regarding the language (the scripting level) I find lua
exceptionally well thought out and clear. the syntax is
intentionally very "boring" -- no surprises here -- and sure much
easier to swallow than tcl, for instance, for people
starting from scratch. regarding the C level API I don't have any
experience (nor an opinion)
but it claims to be much easier than that of other scripting
languages. the LaTeX guys at least have decided to
move into this direction to get a real scripting facility into latex
http://luatex.org/ which personally
I feel was a good decision.
[...]
But please don't also miss out a first-hand experience of someone who
implemented a well-visible program centered around Lua: [1], [2].
I don't know about `awesome' being that "well-visible". in any case the
original `dwm' is much saner and way more stable (or used to be when I
last looked at `awesome' a year ago or so). otherwise it's just a single
(and sure not majority) view of someone who's personal taste is different.
fine with me but sur not sufficient reason for dismissing lua.
Personally, I find that minimality (of the runtime) is the only strong
point of Lua. Then it quickly falls apart when you hit its idiocy with
using tables for everything which is ripe with special weird cases.
always talking from the average scripting usage perspective: I don't see
any deficiency (let alone idiocy) here. works well. I don't miss any other
data type/container. it's just not fancy, but works all the same. but
again: I'm not a lua fan boy and ultimately I don't care what the final
choice will be (if there is to be a single choice).
Lua's stack-based API debunked in [1] also sounds bad to me as I have
decent experience with extending Tcl in C (and embedding it in C), and
I find Tcl's C API to be brilliant as well as its concept of
reference-counted objects. Unfortunately, I have no experience using
Lua from C so I, personally, have no real say here. But still...
yes, all that might be which would mean implementation (making it work)
might be less fun than it could. more important to me is the question how
good the user visible part is working in the end. and here I'm still quite
sure that people would be more happy with lua than with tcl (if that's the
alternative), assuming they know neither before starting.
but to reiterate: is it really worth the trouble to add scripting
capabilities to fossil instead of focusing on more pressing improvements
such as a good grep through old revisions? and also, maybe, just making a
smoother more consistent CLI? fossil sure is the first VCS where I felt
the need to write several small shell scripts (or use others) in order to
make live easy enough (did not happen to me with svn and mercurial at
least). and obviously I'm not the only one as the mailing list clearly
shows...
but i think I will now try to no longer disrupt this thread with such
defeatism ;-)
1. http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2011/why-not-lua
2. http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2008/rants-about-lua
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