I work for a mobile games company as a data scientist. I use Ruby for data wrangling and some sorts of analysis, Python for more specific things (essentially scikit-learn) and bash scripts for gluing everything together.
- Lua is tiny. As someone accostumed to Python and Ruby, it is shocking to see such a small standard library. For example, this is the manual – there are only 158 Lua functions listed there.
- The syntax is incredibly simple. Take a look at these diagrams; if you understand the Extended Backus-Naur Form, you can read Lua’s syntax quite easily. For comparison, Ruby’s syntax is complex enough that there are lots (and lots and lots) of small corner cases that I probably never heard about, even after years using it. Ah! And Ruby’s parse.y has 11.3k lines.
- Lua was built with embedding in mind; it is used for interface customization in World of Warcraft, for example.
- It is a Brazilian programming language! :-) Lua was created in 1993 in Rio de Janeiro, according to Wikipedia.