Apart from seeming to lack interest in robust and polished distribution of their product, it is more the non-technical aspects of working with a language maintained without overt enthusiasm by an absolutely tiny University unit with a rather proprietorial approach to the code (they generously don’t mind bugs being reported, but they’ll do all the fixing thanks). I can imagine techies going for it, but I can also imagine their managers being much less enthusiastic. I just wouldn’t bet the shop on it.
To be fair, I’ve been reading documentation in all sorts of different orders and flitting around repositories in all sorts of different orders. So some are probably talking about an installation where you might need it. I’d argue there is definitely one problem document though …
The Developer Preview Development Tools page seems to talk of 1) using the CLI, and 2) Live Logging, which also uses the CLI. So basically the CLI right?
However that is closely followed by Set Up Your Development Environment which talks about LUA_PATH, the Lua library release, luasocket, luarocks etc, and then jumps onto a discussion of auto-completion and your IDE - IntelliJ or VSCode being examples. So the presence of Lua could be inferred.
It follows that with the Hello World example. That doesn’t involve a Lua installation but is worth a digression. The first command is an instruction to ‘clone the repository’ with:
git clone git@github.com:SmartThingsDevelopers/SampleDrivers.git
Or as we used to say at one place I worked.
HOW TO CATCH A BEAR.
1) Find a bear.
2) ...
Even if knowledge of git, GitHub, cloning and repositories are not critical to being able to type this command, why is there an assumption that command line git is available? I certainly don’t have it. The document is in a browser so at the very least it needs to link to a ZIP file.
I’ll leave you to decide whether LAN Edge Device Driver Development Guide really should come before the section on sharing your driver. It is a bit a leap.
Anyway, I think other examples are here and there. For example in Tutorial | Creating Drivers for Zigbee Devices with SmartThings Edge - Developer Programs / Tutorials - SmartThings Community I am not clear what to make of:
Connect to preview and make sure that SmartThings Lua libraries are available locally.
That might be an editors note or something that sneaked through, but nothing in the rest of the document seems to interest with the SmartThings Lua libraries (do they even exist to make available locally yet?).
UPDATE: It seems you found the main problem while I was knitting a flag here.