Tiobe: Lua enters the top 10 for the first time in history | Hacker News Reader

Tiobe: Lua enters the top 10 for the first time in history

tiobe.com

42 pointskephra28 comments

Although I believe this to be over-valued, we use lua in VLC for writing extensions, and so far, we are quite pleased.

It is fast, simple, close to the C or C++, quite portable and quite portable. I just wished they had a set of official extensions, like for xml or json parsing; because now they are a few competing around...

Use LuaRocks. http://luarocks.org/repositories/rocks/

Very easy to use, and has a lot of modules.

lua-xmlreader is the one that I used for a project. It's a wrapper over libxml2.

Great to know, thx, but that shows exactly what one issue is: there are at least 5 json modules... How are people supposed to know which one to pick?

Probably by testing them all out. Though it would probably help if there were more reviews of the options out there.

That is indeed what we did.

My above point (mis-interpreted, since I got voted down) is that an official set of extensions approved the core lua team would help quite a bit in those choices.

Eh, just pick one. I actually did use a lua JSON module, but I forgot which one. It had a simple interface, though. They probably all do.

JSON was just an example.

The point is that it would be welcome to have a sanctioned list of common extensions (xml, json, oauth...) from the core team.

On StackOverflow, Lua has barely 1.1K questions, while JavaScript has over 100K questions. As a point of comparison, Clojure has 1.6K. The Tiobe method seems flawed.

http://stackoverflow.com/tags

Perhaps the people using JavaScript are the more likely the kinds of people to go asking more questions.

Or JavaScript is the kind of language that requires a lot of question-asking to accomplish anything significant (poor language design/documentation).

I'm not sure that I would frame it that way, but I think that is more or less correct. Lua is such a small language that you generally don't need to ask questions before you do stuff.

The index is basically defined as Google for "<language> programming" then massage the numbers via hand waving and "false positive detection." It's a silly way to measure programming language popularity given all the possible alternatives.

My guess is that their "false positive detection" is penalizing Javascript more than anything. I can understand Lua being #10, but Javascript being #11 is preposterous.

In a perfect world I'd have the power to downvote links to articles regarding "tiobe".

More people use Lua than Javascript? lol

This seemed strange to me also. Lua shot way up and is currently right ahead of Javascript and right below Perl and Python. TIOBE attributes it to iPhone apps, which is probably helping but still wouldn't put it past Javascript. A lot of people write Lua scripts for World of Warcraft UI mods but WoW has been around forever and is actually waning in popularity, not rising. Maybe its the hype around LuaJIT being the dynamic scripting language the best performance?

I think there are more Website containing javascript than any WoW plugins.

Oh yeah, there definitely are by a far margin. I'm just grasping for straws trying to figure out why Lua would have jumped so much. I know TIOBE isn't the end all be all of programming language usage or popularity but something had to cause Lua to jump so high in their rankings in the last year.

And yet Haskell is still #44, below some rather obscure languages (I'm looking at you, Alice and Q). There are serious flaws in Tiobe's methodology.

Not even close: http://langpop.com/

this seems like a better ranking

I wonder how much of the increase can be attributed to Redis' Lua scripting.

i would say, not a lot. The fact that you think this is a big use of lua just speaks about what kind of programming environnement you are in.

Where did that come from? I never said I thought it was a big use. In fact I've never used Redis, but I'm an avid user of Lua and I was glad to see Redis adopt it.

Since Redis is so popular, is it wrong to suppose it was at least partially responsible?

I was mainly confused of http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/images/tpci_tren... when I posting this link. Looking at Lua in the graphic it looks like a typical exponential hype started in early 2011.

I'm using Lua myself, wondering - did I missed a hype?

I also haven't heard anything about this.

https://github.com/languages/Lua #16 https://github.com/languages/Haskell #15

Javascript seems pretty low on that list..

Tiobe index is the single biggest source of language holy wars.

Don't know why it is so highly regarded.

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