No idea why Adobe chose to use it, but I thought I'd ask if anyone out there has experience with it.
Is it fairly easy to get rolling with?
Is there much of a community of Lua hackers?
Would it be hard to find some one if I wanted to contract out the job?
There is a relatively large community of help - I got a lot of tips from the list-servs.
Not hard at all to find coders with Lua experience - I assume most will have a video game coding background, but should be able to get something coded for you - post it on Odesk, rentacoder, et. al. and you'll have no problems
That said, the community is out there, and pretty widespread.
Lua is very small, very portable, very easy to embed and extend in C/C++ based apps and is one of the fastest interpreted languages available. These features taken together are why Lua is the industry standard for runtime scripting in games.
You should be aware, however, that unlike Ruby or Python, Lua's standard library is intentionally minimal and available add-on libraries are relatively sparse. The intention is that you are not inheriting a fat body of functionality when you adopt Lua. Instead you are starting with a slick, flexible core and customizing it into exactly what your app needs.
I'm assuming since Adobe already has an SDK for Lightroom that I wont have to do much customizing ... rather, just interact with their libraries.
I thought Lua was a better fit, but I got overruled.
>Is it fairly easy to get rolling with?
Yes. I thought so.
>Is there much of a community of Lua hackers?
I suspect that since it is a Brazilian invention, that they're be a lot more down south.
If you look for books on Lua, there aren't a lot of them.
Based on the traffic at http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l I'd say there is a small but healthy and growing community.