@dabeaz Lua is a very worthy successor to Python in the role it had in its early days.
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@benjamingeer
I wonder if @ramin_hal9001 @khinsen have any thoughts on scripting, schemes and elisp viz your lua thoughts.
Recently, and I guess unpopularly, I want to view lisp as what I think Liskov coined to be a very high level implementation language (as an untenable idea), a high level language that has so many resources in it that you will not generally want "libraries".
Though embeddable common lisp is my usual compiler, so.
@dabeaz @ricci @tealeg @eeide @cupofcode @sperbsen
@screwlisp Back when I was doing Python advocacy for computational science, in the 2000s, part of my message was "don't embed Python into your app, turn your app into a Python library". The reason was composability.
Back then I was young and naïve and thought that "everyone in science should use Python", so it seemed normal for push for "Python library". Now that I don't use Python any more, the "Python library" approach looks stupid to me - it's a huge dependency.
@khinsen @screwlisp @benjamingeer It may only be a single datapoint, but I thought it was interesting to learn that many of the Python-controlled physics applications at Livermore had switched to Lua-embedded physics applications at some point.
I think a big part of this may have been a switch from "Python library" to "App with embedded scripting" partly due to difficulty in managing/deploying Python libraries.
@dabeaz Lua is a very worthy successor to Python in the role it had in its early days.
@dabeaz That is very interesting! I was under the impression that some things were going in the opposite direction, e.g. Torch being superseded by PyTorch. @khinsen @screwlisp
@screwlisp Unfortunately, I don't have a better universal recommendation. Apps with extension languages still feel like silos with weak composability. But there is no universal composition interface either. Language ecosystems are silos as well.
There's one argument in @benjamingeer's post that I agree with: it's not a language that's good or bad as an extension language, but a implementation with its ecosystem. Practicalities matter a lot.
