Programming and Scripting :: Interview with Lua's daddy

This Techworld series of interviews with key figures in major or at least influential programming languages has been Slashdotted. But where's Perl? Maybe Larry Wall's spent so much time talking about Perl that nobody wants to interview him any more ;=)

This one is with Prof. Roberto Ierusalimschy of Lua fame:

http://www.techworld.com.au/article....ges_lua

Now, just where is Mikshaw when he is needed to reply to something he is interested in? Maybe this will get Robert's interest.

I've noticed a couple of A-Z's posted recently either at ars technica or fsdaily, can't remember which, and was wondering if Lua would be done. I must have missed it (typically only scan the first page of headlines at most once a day). Seems Perl would definitely be included, as you said, but they're not going in strict alphabetical order (Python was done before Lua).

Not a bad interview. I like Roberto's attitude toward programming in general, based on what I could tell from these few answers.

I don't really understand what he was saying about scripting vs dynamic languages, but i guess it will sink in after the coffee starts working.

I truely like Lua for its small size, its clean syntax and that it is extremely fast compared to other scripting languages.

However, for GUIs I have moved on to C++ and Fluid. Much more documentation and much finer control. With option flags to g++ and use of dynamic Fltk libs size can be kept to very small size. In my new project I have converted all of my existing Lua/Fltk to C++ as Fluid projects.

I can understand the logic of dropping scripts and going straight to C++ binaries for speed and size, sounds great.

As for Perl - there is quite a bit already written about the genesis and philosophy of Perl and Larry Wall has always had a high profile. I'm not sure what they'd ask him that he or his subordinate Perl Gods (yes, that's what they call them) haven't already documented. But then, they often have surprises I guess.

One thing I'd like to hear about from them is their response to Perl's loss of ground to Python. The young professional programmers (a few high profile ones) I know, who do a lot more programming than me, don't know any Perl whatsoever. They seem to do all their prototyping and scripting in Python only, including server stuff. Not knowing at least some Perl would have been unthinkable a few years ago, especially for server-end people.

Might have some relation to the fact that both Blender and GIMP utilize python as their main plugin language, and the fact that web programming has unfortunately been moving toward the client side of javascript and plugins rather than server side programming.

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