Small languages (was Re: Lua, Lunatic and Python

[Ville Vainio]

Gustavo Niemeyer <niemeyer at conectiva.com> writes:

> I really don't see Python and Lua overlapping in their fields right
> now. Lua is clearly not developed with general system tasks in mind,
> and Python is clearly not developed to be a configuration language,

I think there was some flame wars on TCL/whatever a while (well, ages)
back, where RMS was insisting that people should not settle for
stripped down languages in favor of "complete" languages. I tend to
agree. Python is a wonderful configuration language, and I don't see
the need to do much "configuring" on systems that can't handle Python.

BTW, how big is something like Guile or other minimal Scheme anyway?
Why wouldn't it do?

> or as small as possible. This may change in the future, but I belive
> (and hope) that instead of Lua becoming a general purpose language,
> the Python core will get smaller, with something like the pypy
> project.

How small does it need to be for your application?

-- 
Ville Vainio   http://www.students.tut.fi/~vainio24