Lua is elegant, small and fast, especially when you're using LuaJIT. It's the language I reach for first when I need to embed a scripting language in a system (

Lua is elegant, small and fast, especially when you're using LuaJIT. It's the language I reach for first when I need to embed a scripting language in a system (perhaps to replace configuration files). Its only real drawback is a lack of libraries/package manager compared to, say, Python/Ruby (respectively). I guess some people might miss built-in support for classes.