Playing with Lua is a blast. I don't have much experience in using it for anything but a third-order language (e.g. writing programs that write programs), but i

Playing with Lua is a blast. I don't have much experience in using it for anything but a third-order language (e.g. writing programs that write programs), but it's very lightweight, fast, and easy to pick up. I view it as a language that I use when I need the power of a programming language (as opposed to a one-off program), but not enough to justify using Perl/Python/Ruby. There are some parts that I did find annoying, however, like the fact that in the standard libraries array indexing starts at 1 instead of 0 and that it gets a bit kludgy when you try and add lots of things that are not part of standard language features, but nothing you can't overcome.