On Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:03:18 -0400 dmccunney <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 3:17 PM, Rob Landley <[email protected]> wrote: > <snip> > > The lua thing fell apart trying to write mount, ifconfig, netcat, > > losetup, nsenter, ionice, chroot, swapon, setsid, insmod, taskset, > > dmesg... The language just didn't have the bindings. > > I rather like Lua, but I bear in mind the domain it addresses. It's > intended to be an embedded scripting language you can call from within > your application. You can't write stand alone Lua code because it > lacks the infrastructure. It assumes the application it's embedded in > will handle that, and it doesn't need to. It's gotten a fair amount of > pick up as the script engine for games, and there are a couple of IDEs > intended for writing Lua used in games. > > It's also popping up as the script language in editors. One of the > things I'm poking at the TextAdept, an extensible text editor. It > uses the Scintilla edit control, and Lua for scripting. The C code > is under 2,000 lines and will remain so (and is basically the > framework to embed Scintilla and Lua.) The actual editing functions > are written in Lua, and you can extend it all over the map by writing > Lua code, in a manner akin to extending Gnu Emacs in eLisp. The Lua > code is currently about 4,000 lines. This is the sort of thing I might do to boxes, the editor I was trying to get into toybox. Implementing a bunch of editors needed some sort of internal language that wraps editing primitives, and I'm a fan of Lua. The original wasn't going to use Lua, since Lua isn't in toybox for the reasons Rob gives above. I'm still not sure what direction I should take boxes, now that it's not going into toybox, and it's currently waiting on someone else to right some code anyway. <snip> > > It would be nice if there were some youtube clips on "an > > introduction to sed", "an introduction to awk", and so on. I might > > wind up doing them someday if nobody else beats me to it. > > Oh, crap. Sorry, but one of my pet peeves these days is the > increasing use of video as documentation. Video has a place, but I > can *read* much faster than I can *watch*. Give me a bleeping written > tutorial, that I can have open in one window while I experiment in > another. This I fully agree with. You can't copy paste text from a video, making them useless for teaching shell stuff. It's a lot easier and quicker to back your eyes up and re read a sentence you didn't grok the first time, than it is to rewind the video, and deal with the inaccuracy of the rewind process. Try searching a two hour video for a bit of text, grep's gonna find it a hell of a lot quicker in a written tutorial. You can slow down or speed up your reading depending on your ability to keep up, but that's just not possible in a video, the thing will drone on at it's fixed pace. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but it's worth way more than that in bandwidth requirements, and videos even more so. My bandwidth is precious to me, I don't have a lot. It's expensive here in Oz. Consider that an entire average novel would fill an entire average floppy disk back in the day, and how big the average digital photo is, you're not gonna squeeze an entire novel into a photo. Having that trouble now, the gubermit has enrolled me in an online course, I calculate that downloading all the videos for that course will fully soak up five months of my bandwidth for the six month course. I want to do other things with my bandwidth. I'm trying to negotiate this video silliness away, but they aren't talking. The crazy thing is that after poking around their web site, I have stumbled across what looks like a written version of their first video, carefully hidden away. I'm not sure yet if it actually matches the videos in subject matter that is to be tested, they wont tell me. I'll have to watch the first video and compare I guess. There may be more of these text versions. -- A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.
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