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Zed Should have used Lua(the entire lua source distro weighs couple of hundred kilo bytes). Lua is superb embedded language and even better configuration language.

No one needs to know it is Lua, (which also happens to be a marketing problem for Lua, heh).

His decision not to use Lua the second time around is perplexing because he is not averse to reusing third-party libraries and he is already using the code from Lua for URL pattern matching (IIRC).

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Josh Simmons, one of the main Mongrel2 hackers other than Zed, is already working on that.

The idea behind Mongrel2 is that you can write your own configuration system in any language you want, as long as the final result is an SQLite3 database. The one in C that ships with Mongrel2 is "just" a default - if you don't like it, it's not hard to roll your own.

Here's an early peek Josh's Lua config tool, and a sample config file: http://gist.github.com/578726

Well, he said he made the new parser read the unchanged config file format. Presumably, lua would have needed a change of syntax.

Also possibly he decided to step outside the language wars because it's less hassle to write your own parser than wrangle language partisans.

Exactly. It was part technical and part social.

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