> If you are making an application from scratch using just the stand-alone interpreter, your scripts and a bunch of dependencies from the internets, use Python.

> If you are making an application from scratch using just the stand-alone interpreter, your scripts and a bunch of dependencies from the internets, use Python. People work really hard to make this semi-viable in Lua, but it is a path of frustration. It's unfortunate that Lua doesn't work well for this. The Lua implementation's light weight, portability and robustness [0] seem ideal for building these applications - especially for building applications that can be distributed to end-users (a scenario which is not a focus of Python [1]). Obviously Lua is never going to include a large standard library because that conflicts with its embeddability. However, even in the Python community, “batteries included” is no longer considered entirely beneficial [2]. Instead, I think Lua would benefit from a set of officially recommended external libraries. This would improve the situation for people trying to write standalone applications in Lua, and I believe it would also help those who are writing scripts targeting embedded interpreters. [0] https://www.lua.org/bugs.html https://www.lua.org/bugs.html [1] https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/1347045076401147904 https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/1347045076401147904 [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/790677/ https://lwn.net/Articles/790677/