[gnosis]

99% of vim scripts still use VimScript.

I think this happens for a few reasons:

  - First, as you pointed out, not every user is guaranteed
    to have your favorite language installed.  But they will
    have VimScript whenever they use vim.

  - Second, even if a user has your favorite language
    installed, the version of vim they have might not be
    compiled with bindings for that language.  Only VimScript
    is guarateed to be compiled in.

  - Third, VimScript is the only language in vim that's not
    crippled in some way in respect to functionality.  All
    the other languages it supports have to rely on
    VimScript itself in order to perform some vim-related
    functions.  In some languages, this makes it so that you
    might as well be using VimScript to begin with.

[siddboots]

#2 has been the biggest drawback in my experience. It often isn't realistic to compile your editor from scratch, particularly when you are working in a windows environment without administrator rights to your machine. This means that any extensions (e.g. dbext) dependent on those bindings are unavailable.

Is there a reason why there is no portable binary compiled with bindings for perl, python, lua, et cetera?