Wow. I never expected to see Sailor Moon references in HN.

I never tried Lua before. Is this a good place to start? I'm looking to learn something new.

LÖVE might be a fun place to start: https://love2d.org/

(Also, I can't believe I didn't get the Sailor Moon reference...)

Check out http://moonscript.org/ too (CoffeeScript for Lua).

Lua is Moon in Portuguese, so for some people it might be easier to get ;)

I'm always so happy when people get the reference :D

I think it's a great place to start! Lua is a fantastic language!

Don't see why not as a place to start. The book "Programming in Lua" is really well written if you want some background, but you can probably pick up the basics easily anyway.

Check out Lua Missions[1] for a quick tour of basic Lua.

[1]: https://github.com/kikito/lua_missions

Play with https://github.com/mashape/kong - becoming the largest Lua project.

I've been paying attention to this project for a while since the space for Lua frameworks is rather quite small. While I am interested in evaluating it once it matures, the biggest stumbling block for it so far is that the documentation and tutorials needs more polish and love.

I understand that it may be difficult finding someone willing to edit and clean up documentation, much less fill it in where things are currently empty, but it's not too soon to try and prioritize this. It may be worth trying to collect donations to start a bounty in the hopes of attracting someone who wishes to do the work and I personally would be happy to pitch in what I could toward it.

I've been putting a good effort into the documentation recently :) But I agree that the more the better!

With the coming of WebAssembly, I think Lua might become a popular choice. I've only dabbled with it, but it seems impressive. Thank you for the heads-up on this. I plan to check it out.

There has been some discussions about WebAssembly at the lua mail list and I get sooooo excited thinking about the implications it could have! _ I too believe it could make Lua a popular choice.

I definitely prefer Lua to Javascript, but in my opinion the languages are roughly similar enough that it's not worth going through the trouble to swap one out for the other.

You don't get any of the weak typing, but you still have very similar syntax and features, same dynamic typing, same prototype OOP. Lua doesn't hold enough of an advantage over JS to warrant the cost of trying to get it in the browser.

I really like lua, and have been using openresty(nginx+lua) apart from lua inside openwrt environments. Will try this when I need anything resembling MVC.

Try http://getkong.org (openresty+nginx)

I've been lightly following this for a while now (and it looks really good) but sadly so far I see hardly any benefit in using Lua without openresty for web development (I have two fun projects using Lapis and some more boring stuff in production in pure openresty+Lua, without any external libs). Why openresty? Simply for performance reasons - when using Python the ecosystem is just exponentially bigger than Lua's and for the stuff I need Flask usually is the right answer and gives quick results and stable(!) libraries for everything are at hand.

I don't understand your comment, Sailor can be used with various web servers, openresty included! :)

Awesome! Maybe I just didn't look properly but I was under the impression (from a while back) that I only saw Apache support.

That was a goooood while back ^_^' The openresty support is not perfect yet, but it's there and one of the next steps is to make it better :D

I can't comment about the framework since I don't speak Lua, but I want to congratulate the author for her work. Less than 1% of opensource contributors are women. Women are already under-represented in tech, but in opensource women are even more under-represented, so this is good to see.

I don't know about you, but for me that's really irrelevant. And honestly, why is this the top comment? Why should the gender of a person contributing code, of all things, matter?

I know that I'm not living in an ideal world and I know what kind of discrimination, both overt and covert, women go through in all walks of life. I also understand that it takes a lot for any group of people, not just women, to succeed when they are being discriminated against.

However, I feel, that giving someone a pat on the back just because they are from a discriminated group is demeaning. Why not instead comment on the code? Commend good code, suggest code improvements. I would rather appreciate the output than make any comment on their gender, because finally, that is the true achievement and that should speak for itself. And in my opinion, that is what that person is looking for - to be judged not because of who they are or where they come from but for what they have done.

Whether their comment was appropriate or not, we don't need to make this a discussion here! Please.

Does it make sense to have special laws to protect endangered species? Why not protect all species? Does it make sense to have more severe punishment for cop killers? Why not have severe punishment for all killers? Does it make sense to have extra fines for drivers who break rules in construction zones? Does it make sense to have a special coaching for girls who code ( https://girlswhocode.com/ ?) Why not provide that extra coaching to all kids? Because we live in the real world, not some utopia.

Another good one is Lapis (leafo.net/lapis/)