Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks

Wrapping Up Lua

A lot of programmers see the surface of Lua’s clean syntax and assume it’s just another everyday scripting language. I certainly had that feeling at first glance. But I hope that as you’ve taken a deeper look at its tables and coroutines, you’ve enjoyed their beauty and simplicity.

Strengths

Recall Lua’s original goal: to be an approachable, portable language for stitching together software components. These are all properties of a good configuration language—small wonder, then, that this sweet spot is where Lua shines.

Lua’s source code is easy to read, runs quickly, and works on a huge variety of platforms. A newer implementation of the language, LuaJIT, takes these advantages even further with faster performance and a friendlier ...