[metapost] lua news

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

The addition of lua to TeX and Metafont has been an interesting
development.  This snippet from the ACM TechNews Bulletin today
shows that others have recognized the value of lua as well, even
if not directly for font design and typesetting:

>> ...
>> Meet Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Anyone Can Code
>> Wired News (03/19/13) Cade Metz
>>
>> Lua, a 20-year-old programming language, has been opened up to the
>> public so that anyone can build material on Wikipedia and its sister
>> websites.  "We wanted to provide editors with a real programming
>> language," says the Wikimedia Foundation's Rob Lanphier.  "This will
>> make things easier for editors, but it will also be significantly
>> faster."  Wikipedia editors previously used templates to reuse
>> material on multiple pages across the site, but that process bogged
>> down the editing process as they accumulated.  "The template language
>> evolved into something like a programming language, but it was never
>> designed to be a programming language," Lanphier notes.  The
>> foundation thus migrated to Lua, a scripting language developed to
>> automate the execution of frequently repeated tasks.  Wikimedia
>> selected Lua on the merit of it being specifically designed for
>> embedding code and because it enables site administrators to carefully
>> control how that code is carried out.  "We're able to constrain things
>> such that we don't have to worry about an author accidentally--or on
>> purpose--changing an article in such a way that it brings down our
>> servers," Lanphier says.  He also notes that anyone can teach
>> themselves Lua programming by viewing a sample code embedded in an
>> existing article.
>> 
>> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/wikipedia-lua/
>> ...

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
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