Get rid of Windows. Problem solved.

And replace it with what?

Nothing. You can't brick the OS if you don't have one! /s

iOS is by far the best mobile platform out there, in terms of its development environment. The problem is that everyone is using the crippled version of it.

Cydia/Theos/Cycript were developed by two people and they come together so much better than that shitty Xcode stack it blows my mind. They are so good that iOS being closed source isn't even a con anymore. They are probably the most underrated tools in existence; most people haven't heard of them (let alone regularly use them) because the industry doesn't see un-jailed iOS as an lucrative market. It's a damn shame.

No it's not.

Is there a fork of this with no premine?

I'm interested in this as well. The main fork is so bad, that if a fork existed, most Zcash users would flock to that.

If we're making generalizations here, then women generally don't like hunching over a computer monitor in isolation for 6+ hours every day. Much like how men generally don't like to put on makeup and act in plays.

Or you can just use a subset of it, where privacy is of no concern. Those craigslist-esque groups that have been popping up are immensely useful. Especially with the built-in messenger.

Jailbreaking solves the walled garden issue. What are the millions of other reasons?

It's interesting to see the trajectory of Lua adoption. The determining factor of the popularity of most languages was at the fate of large companies, (AT&T/C, Netscape/JavaScript, Microsoft/C++, Google/Python). On the flip side, Lua seems to slowly gain more and more popularity over the years. It's more "organic", for lack of a better term.

I really hope a big company doesn't pick Lua up, because I think the fact that it hasn't reached "Eternal September" yet is what makes it such a good language. It has room to breathe.

(The fact that it's beginner friendly, has an ANSI C89 implementation, and has the best/fastest JIT/FFI doesn't hurt either though :P)

My favorite utopia is Lua becoming mainstream and killing JS. But I agree with you that one of the reasons Lua is so nice is exactly because that didn't happen, so it's a tough choice. This is precisely the reason why many members of the community refuse to treat it as a general purpose language and keep enforcing it as a niche because they're trying to protect their special snowflake. I do think Lua is growing faster outside the embedded systems & games niches now, with Torch for machine learning and OpenResty for the web. I'm very excited and I hope this growth gets more support! We need more people pushing for this :D

>AT&T/C, Netscape/JavaScript, Microsoft/C++, Google/Python

I wonder if you can provide more background on that, particularly those last 2. And by AT&T, you mean Unix, right? :p

I am not the o.p. but: the success of Unix helped the success of C, JavaScript succeeded because Netscape made it the only one on the browser, C++ won the war against Objective-C as the "object-oriented successor of C" because Microsoft embraced it and they had a lot more power than Next (that embraced Obj-C). Python did sustain its fight with Ruby (and PHP) for the role of "sane successor of Perl" because Google provided so many libraries and frameworks.

Google's contribution to the success of Python was really minimal. Most of the top stuff was not from Google at all.

Microsoft was the last C vendor on MS-DOS to add C++ support to their compilers....

I wonder why people keep pushing this, Microsoft was the last C vendor to support C++ on MS-DOS.

Even on Windows, all the C++ alternatives were way better until they released the 32 bit version of Visual C++.

Yep. The way I remember it is that until MSVC 6, everyone was still using Borland or Watcom tools. Even up until the early 2000s, Borland C++ Builder was giving MSVC a run for the money. There was also a plethora of quality but smaller-marketshare tools like the Digital Mars stuff.

The real reasons C++ "beat" Obj-C have more to do with a) AT&T aggressively marketing C++ for at least 6 years before NeXT showed up on the scene, b) C++ being a little older then Obj-C in the first place, and c) Obj-C offering all the expressiveness of C with all the efficiency of Smalltalk (thank you, James Iry).

Also other things that came to mind, CORBA on UNIX, Apple's move from Object Pascal to C++, and the whole Taligent project that ended up nowhere.

The project released it's first public beta in 2007, so you probably can't count that as a recent Lua win. ^^

that's true, but I do think it's interesting that someone thought about it, decided to post it here and there are people discussing. I've been seeing Lua regularly on hackernews recently and that's awesome!

So, you think it's a good thing (for Lua) that Netscape made JS instead of just using Lua?

It's a good thing for Lua but not a good thing for the web and these things are partially mutually exclusive.

One of the reasons Lua's evolution is better than JS is because managing versions when you have to keep browser compatibility is way more difficult.

Hm. Good point.

Yeah, because it would have solidified Lua == 2.1. Instead of Lua == 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, or LuaJIT.

That would be a pity.

Isn't LuaJIT now unmaintained?

No, it's not. It was "adopted" by cloudflare, and although Mike Pall is a special person, there are other people who are contributors.

No, but it's forked: LuaJIT is compatible with Lua 5.1, and mostly compatible with 5.2), but not with 5.3.

Both Lua and LuaJIT are maintained and in active development.

LuaJIT != Lua

I'm in the process of swapping out my phone for my old iPod Touch. It creates a lot of moments where getting access to the internet requires effort (e.g. asking people for their WiFi password, finding/knowing about public places with WiFi, looking up routes in Google Maps and screenshotting it before leaving WiFi, etc).

Doesn't work for everyone, but works for me.

And also I save $50 a month.