Lua's Development Style (2008)

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• Subject: Re: another try at multithreading
• From: Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>
• Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:40:26 -0300

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> > Today Lua doesn't seems to have a completely open process on that manner,
> > the authors make a good job discussing most of things on this list but there
> > is no repository of source code that we can see the advances and test them
> > before they make into an official release, so for a second forked tree to
> > update to the main tree would be difficult too, what about changing this?
> > Roberto? Luiz? What are you thoughts about that?
> 
> See http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2002-06/msg00082.html

I think that discussion, being six years old, may be a little outdated
(even if several things remain the same). So I would like to give my
personal view about the development of Lua.

Lua is open software, but it has never been open developed. As an
anonymous coward once sarcastically wrote in Slashdot, Lua is our
language. That does not mean we do not listen to other people. We read
practically every message in the list. Several important features in
Lua started or evolved from outside contributions (e.g., metatables,
coroutines, and the implementation of closures, to name just some big
ones). But ultimately, we decide. We do not do this because we consider
our judgment better than others'. It is only because we want Lua to be
the language we want it to be, not to be the most popular language in
the world.

Accordingly, our discussion style may be considered somewhat unusual by
some people. We do not argue till exhaustion defending our points of
view.  We present ours and read others'. If we consider that we have
something that really contributes new material to the discussion, we may
reply. But we do not feel obliged to convince others (or even ourselves)
that our point of view is the "best" one.

Because of this development style, we prefer not to have a public
repository for Lua. That is not because there are secrets there. We can
provide a current snapshot of Lua if anyone asks. Before new versions,
people have enough opportunities to express their opinions when we
release work versions. But we do not want to have to explain every
single change we make to the code. We do not want to keep documentation
updated all the time. We want freedom to follow strange ideas and then
to give up without having to explain every move.

-- Roberto

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