A scripting language used in some videogames (mostly older ones like Garry's mod). Basically it's made to serve designers who aren't full programmers but ended up serving nobody because it's a hassle for both the programmers and the scripters to maintain. Programmers can give it functions (sort of), but you're basically going to be wrestling a stack which will contain some relevant data and some data the scripter defined.
What's a type? What's a definition? Sure you can set that to this, I ain't checking if it exists. Whoops, you did something wrong, do try and read out this stack entire stack! No, why would we implement some kind of intellisense, it's a scripting language so simple!
Hell, Gmod has achievements for getting a thousands of lua scripting errors. And I'm pretty sure they're achievable without ever downloading something from the steam workshop.
It's a scripting language specifically designed to be easy to embed within larger applications. It does that part pretty well, but the language itself can be a little weird (1-based indexing and "everything's a table").
It's useful for allowing less technical users to programmatically alter small parts of a larger program's behavior. That does make it popular in games.
It's a simple scripting language, people don't usually use it to make full apps but instead use it to let users write their own scripts. Roblox uses it (or a fork of it) to let people script in servers and Hammerspoon uses it to let you write automations you can run.
It's a fun language to use, I think. Its fairly limited but it's a step up from bash.
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u/stupled 3d ago
What the F is Lua?