Some days before, Reuben Thomas (a known contributor to Lua community) announced the release of Nancy, "a simple web site builder" at the Lua mailing list.
For the dismay of Lua afficcionados, this release was not written in Lua.
Oh, and it's written in Perl. I thought it might be interesting to say why. The problem was not libraries (I used my pure-Lua stdlib and LuaFileSystem), but deployment on Windows (I use Linux). I had previously built an all-in-one binary for Windows using a cross-compiler. That worked fine but made it hard to debug on Windows as I couldn't just edit-run, and also broke nastily when the cross-compiler was upgraded. So, I switched to LuaBinaries. That enabled me in the end to deploy only pre-built binaries, but at the cost of having to install 2 binary packages, and then do manual fiddling to get .lua files run as commands by the Windows shell.
ActivePerl does all this for me, and I was already using some Perl scripts in the same system, so by rewriting Nancy in Perl I got down to "run the Perl installer" as being the prerequisites for running Nancy.
Nancy begun its life as Lua code (and that's the reason Reuben announced this at Lua mailing list for the last time — unless it be written in Lua again in the future).
Perl still has an edge ahead before some of the popular dynamical languages out there, which (I hope) is not going away anytime soon in the future.
