Lua shines at interfacing with C; it's useful when you've got a high-performance engine in C or C++, and want a friendly programming interface to control it. T

Lua shines at interfacing with C; it's useful when you've got a high-performance engine in C or C++, and want a friendly programming interface to control it. That's obviously the case for games and their 3D / physics engines, but Lua is steadily gaining momentum in the embedded devices world, where CPUs are also pushed to the limits of their (lesser) capabilities. Web developers have already put most of their high performance wizardry in their SQL engines, and already have standardized/comprehensive APIs to these databases; I don't think Lua would bring them much, and certainly not enough to compensate for the loss of Python's or Ruby's existing web-friendly libraries.