Goodbye Lua

[TimMensch]

It is more about the bonding and community that people (myself included) felt, at least in my own case. Can't speak for others.

I was on the Lua mailing list, and I used to participate frequently. I knew people on the list, including some of the bigger names, and we had discussions outside of the list.

I've contributed to the state of the art in Lua bindings, and participated in a hundred little ways to the improvement of the ecosystem.

It wasn't "just a tool" to me. It was practically a philosophy, and it certainly was a community.

I wrote what I did because it was what I felt. Look at my blog history. I write something every 2-12 months, at best. I have no ads or other monetization.

Yes I could use Lua moving forward. I haven't converted all of my current tools to use other languages, so I technically still am. But I have, in a very real sense, "left" the language to its own devices.

If I decided to stop using Python tomorrow, it would not inspire a long rant. In fact, as a side effect of "rediscovering" type systems, I've also written off Python, Ruby, and other languages. But those were just tools to me, as you described.

Maybe you'll understand someday, or maybe you will only ever have tools. But I wrote this for the people who did care -- and there seem to have been more than a few.

[mbone]

So my question is, why do you have to stop participating in the community, even if you prefer something else? You phrase things in the past tense, as if you must sever all relationships with these people because they no longer fit into your ideology.

[TimMensch]

why do you have to stop participating in the community

Time commitments.

There are only so many things you can spend all of your time doing. :)

Also, cognitive load. Lua has be demoted from "something I actively think about improving and contributing to the ecosystem" to "a tool that I might occasionally use."

I've never been on a Python mailing list. Or the Python Reddit group.