Episode 15: Lua

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News

• Facebook IPO
• http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-21/facebook-11-percent-drop-means-morgan-stanley-gets-blame-for-flop-tech
• Twitter want to improve friend recommendations by tracking
• http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/17/twitter-wants-an-interest-graph/
• Arduino Programming in JavaScript
• http://weblog.bocoup.com/javascript-arduino-programming-with-nodejs/
• Brain Controlled Robots
• http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/paralyzed-woman-controls-robotic-arm-sips-coffee/
• Why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays
• http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2012/05/engineeringinfrastructures/

Tool of the Biweek

• Jason: BerkeleyDB & JDBM3: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/berkeleydb/overview/index.html https://github.com/jankotek/JDBM3
• Patrick: Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Lua

History

• Originated in Brazil

Features

• Interpreted (compiled to bytecode on the fly)
• Dynamic typing
• Tables & Meta-Tables

Strengths

• Easy C / C++ Integration
• luabind: http://www.rasterbar.com/products/luabind.html
• Diluculum: http://www.stackedboxes.org/~lmb/diluculum/
• Execution speed

Weaknesses

• Everything based on tables & meta-tables (classes are possible, but clunky)
• Not as fully featured as python or ruby

Tools

• Lua Libraries: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LibrariesAndBindings

Uses

• Video Game Scripting (World of Warcraft)
• LightRoom UI
• Application Scripting