Lua, a 20-year-old programming language, has been opened up to the public so that anyone can build material on Wikipedia and its sister websites. “We wanted to provide editors with a real programming language,” says the Wikimedia Foundation’s Rob Lanphier. “This will make things easier for editors, but it will also be significantly faster.” (…) The foundation thus migrated to Lua, a scripting language developed to automate the execution of frequently repeated tasks. Wikimedia selected Lua on the merit of it being specifically designed for embedding code and because it enables site administrators to carefully control how that code is carried out. “We’re able to constrain things such that we don’t have to worry about an author accidentally–or on purpose–changing an article in such a way that it brings down our servers,” Lanphier says. He also notes that anyone can teach themselves Lua programming by viewing a sample code embedded in an existing article.
Categorias: Prêmios e Honrarias