5 ms·

You should not evaluate the worth of something by the number of people that use it.

• swolchok 17y ago
  Pithy and sounds good, but totally discounts network effects. Programming languages are subject to network effects -- users create libraries in the language, increasing the usefulness of the language. Of course, interoperation between languages is possible to some degree, but that doesn't detract from the core statement.
  • silentbicycle 17y ago
    It's really not hard to use C libraries from Lua, and its design for embedding / use as an off-the-shelf extension language has made interfacing easily with other languages a high priority. There are projects that supposedly allow interoperability with Python, Perl, and several other languages (http://lua-users.org/wiki/BindingCodeToLua http://lua-users.org/wiki/BindingCodeToLua), though I have only used the C API thus far. The core language is also small and simple enough that adding major language extensions, such as Erlang's concurrency model (http://concurrentlua.luaforge.net/ http://concurrentlua.luaforge.net/), is feasible.
    • swolchok 17y ago
      Many useful libraries are in languages other than C.
    • garnet7 17y ago
      > It's really not hard to use C libraries from Lua, ... My understanding is that it's actually very easy to use C libs from Lua.
      • silentbicycle 17y ago
        You have to be comfortable with C, so that rules out some people.