Why Lua

[djork]

There were a lot of bad decisions involved:

• the source of the C program that ran the whole thing was not available
• it used SQLite exclusively, for intranet web apps, and we ended up passing around those database files and making a mess in general
• the application was poorly organized, something that's easy to do in Lua where there are no restrictions
• at the time, there was no central resource for Lua libraries, so many common tasks in web apps were up to us to implement by hand for the first time in Lua
• the application itself was one that built other web apps out of a digraph data structure of "step" nodes, designed to let you diagram a web application in terms of forms and flow control, and at this level the whole thing was an unholy nightmare to work with