Personally, I think Lua's widespread use in game programming stems from it's performant design, paradigm flexibility, and the fact that it's not hard to embed i

Personally, I think Lua's widespread use in game programming stems from it's performant design, paradigm flexibility, and the fact that it's not hard to embed into an existing project. There are other languages that have this mindset too, but I think Lua's been able to capture enough mindshare to be quite sticky in the industry. I've met quite a few game programmers that don't like parts of Lua, and wish there was something that was closer to C++ rather than JavaScript.