What can I do to help further Mids??

[Crytilis]

I completely understand Tony if nothing else maybe only look into LUA (in your spare time) to perhaps at least enhance some features since it will literally interface with almost any language. Very cool stuff =) but I have no doubt that you all will succeed in whichever way you go in the future just a matter of brainstorming =). Tony I had asked you before I think or I thought I did. How did you guys intercept the in game data using the windows API? I know you prob wont talk bout it much here in public but more insight would def help me with a program I'm working on "nothing to do with anything titan is working on though so no worries (as if you ever were lol)" Cause I'll admit my knowledge of C is lacking lol but if you could drop me a pm and perhaps even give me some pointers I'd appreciate it. Once I am done I wouldn't even mind dropping the program to you if you should choose to add it to those already here in the Titan Network.

[Supa Troll]

Lua is a nice language, extremely simple and elegant syntax. My one pet peeve with it is its practice of treating any variable not explicitly defined as local as a global variable, which leads to difficult-to-debug problems involving variable leaks and global namespace collisions.

It's not really suitable for developing a full-fledged application in, however. It's designed first and foremost as a scripting language, and is really intended to be embedded in another executable that provides an interface (in fact the language itself bends over backwards to make it easy to embed). There are some ways to run it standalone, and a couple of UI libraries like Qt/GTK bindings, but those have a much steeper learning curve than the language itself, and in my experience tend to be fragile and a little clunky.

It's also not very fast. While it's probably comparable to Python and other interpreted languages without a JIT, it really suffers if you have to do anything compute-heavy in it. Most environments that use it punt and provide native code callable from Lua to do the heavy lifting. It's also not thread-aware, which is problematic if you're trying to write an entire application in it and still have the UI be responsive.

Now, a lot of those problems you're going to have with HTML5+JS as well, but at least you get a cross-platform UI for free without having to do any extra work. Lua and Javascript's approach to object-orientation is actually fairly similar, in that neither are very rigid frameworks.

You should write the next hero planner in Scala

[Fleeting Whisper]

I'm not saying that Lua is hard, I'm only saying that it's not really suitable for the purpose of building a client-side web app.  And while it may be easy to you, there's still a learning curve involved that everyone else at the Titan Network would have to go through if we wanted to use it for any back-end work, plus a learning curve I'd have to go through to get it set up and configured to process HTTP requests and make sure it's secure and efficient.

Actually, I've already got fairly extensive experience with Lua, Tony

As SupaTroll said, though, it's not really suitable for writing an app with. It's a simple scripting language that's easy to write an interpreter for, to use alongside something else. My experience with Lua was extending an existing application, to open it up to another set of rules for tabletop gaming. I do know Lua's used in Dawn of War to keep track of various things in campaign mode (you can even edit a specific Lua file to skip levels), and it's used in Call of Duty to assist with the AI.

That said, I've never heard of someone using Lua as part of a web app; I suppose you could use CGI to run a Lua script, but I don't think installing Lua on the server would be necessary when you could just use JavaScript.

It kinda reminds me of the grad student I knew who worked at Google, who -- instead of simply writing the program he needed -- wrote a Scheme interpreter, and then wrote his program in Scheme. It's an extra, unnecessary step to achieve a goal.