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by jessegreathouse 3721 days ago
A language that gets widespread usage in projects other than academic.
3 comments

Another definition I could see working: a language that is used in projects bigger/more complicated that its own compiler or standard library.
Hahaha! You got me!
Lua is widely used and well respected in the game industry (WOW for example [1]), for its efficiency and embeddability.

[1] http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Lua

What's an example of a "not real language" then? I'm feeling a little hard pressed to find an academic language that is not used in industry. I always thought of Lua as academic because I associated it with Torch, but Facebook and Google are both heavy users of Torch, besides Lua has been heavily used in gaming as an embedded scripting language outside of machine learning applications.
Neovim is also working on replacing VimL with Lua (by translating VimL to Lua). I think that'll be pretty cool (you will be able to match the emacs people on having all of your configuration in a full programming language).
Idris. Really interesting language exploring dependent types for practical programming, but not yet production ready.