4 ms·

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 performan

by samps 17y ago

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.

m0th87 17y ago
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.
- iamwil 17y ago
  _why wrote a web server in lua, just for fun. It's available as a lua rock (like a ruby gem or python egg).
  - samps 17y ago
    Got a link?
  - silentbicycle 17y ago
    I don't see it on LuaRocks ATM, just the Kepler / Xavante stuff. What was it called?
  - iamwil 17y ago
    My bad. I had a brain fart. He wrote a web framework (not server) for Io, not Lua. http://github.com/whymirror/yown http://github.com/whymirror/yown
- baddox 17y ago
  I am a novice programmer, but have used Lua for some basic (second- or third-year college programming level) projects, and I found the transition from the very mainstream languages (Java/PHP/Python) extremely easy. That said, I was doing fairly straight-forward imperative programming, so perhaps I never delved deep enough to see the "foreign" parts of Lua. To me, Lua seemed as easy a language to learn as one could hope for.

by samps 17y ago

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.

m0th87 17y ago

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.

iamwil 17y ago
_why wrote a web server in lua, just for fun. It's available as a lua rock (like a ruby gem or python egg).
- samps 17y ago
  Got a link?
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  I don't see it on LuaRocks ATM, just the Kepler / Xavante stuff. What was it called?
- iamwil 17y ago
  My bad. I had a brain fart. He wrote a web framework (not server) for Io, not Lua. http://github.com/whymirror/yown http://github.com/whymirror/yown
baddox 17y ago
I am a novice programmer, but have used Lua for some basic (second- or third-year college programming level) projects, and I found the transition from the very mainstream languages (Java/PHP/Python) extremely easy. That said, I was doing fairly straight-forward imperative programming, so perhaps I never delved deep enough to see the "foreign" parts of Lua. To me, Lua seemed as easy a language to learn as one could hope for.