I feel I need to publish a word of respect.

Let me speak about Lua, a tiny language that allows embedding into your own application.

So far, I believed TCL is the holy grail of scripting languages, and I believe it still is. No other language is an under-cover artificial intelligence language embeddable and offering object-oriented and aspect-oriented extensions. No other language offers this unlimited power.

Nevertheless, looking for a solution sufficient to the cause, power is not everything. Sometimes it must be small, compact and easy to deal with. The TCL interpreter has grown to an extent that it does not really match attributes like “small” or “compact”. Lua, on the other hand, is an interpreter that fits into a total of 64kB RAM, which is a masterpiece in tiny technology.

The language offers a lot (I am at this moment scanning through an introductory book): modern language features, flexible data types and a decent level of anarchy.

When I first stepped on this language, I did not take it seriously. I had learned that some micro-controllers can be programmed in Lua and a friend told me, that this is pretty easy. Did not convince me, to be honest. Now I had to deal with it, because the imapfilter that I need for my comment-system for Hugo is simply based on Lua (regarding its config). So I took a book and did what you do with a book, read quickly! What I learned after less than half of the book, is that I am going to read more about Lua and learn how to embed it to my own solutions. This stuff has quite some sex appeal!

Once I master this, I will publish some examples and an experience-report.

For this interested: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LearningLua