Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. Lua is designed to be a general-purpose language, but it is particularly well-suited for embedded systems and applications that require a small footprint and high performance.

1. Lightweight: Lua has a small memory footprint, making it ideal for embedded systems and applications with limited resources.
2. Fast: Lua is designed for speed, with a simple and efficient interpreter.
3. Embeddable: Lua can be easily embedded into applications, allowing for customization and extension.
4. Extensible: Lua provides powerful mechanisms for extending the language with new features and libraries.
5. Portable: Lua is written in ANSI C, making it highly portable across different platforms.

Lua was created in 1993 by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) in Brazil. The language was designed to be a flexible and extensible scripting language for use in various applications, including configuration, data entry, and scripting in games.

Lua is used in a wide range of applications, including:

• Game Development: Lua is widely used in the gaming industry for scripting game logic, AI, and other game-related tasks. Popular game engines like Unity, Corona SDK, and CryEngine support Lua scripting.
• Embedded Systems: Lua's small footprint and efficiency make it ideal for embedded systems, such as IoT devices and microcontrollers.
• Web Development: Lua can be used for web development, particularly in conjunction with web servers like Nginx and OpenResty.
• Configuration and Scripting: Lua is often used for configuration files and scripting in various applications, including network devices and software applications.

To give you a taste of Lua, let's look at a simple Lua script that prints "Hello, World!" to the console:

• -- This is a comment in Lua: This line is a comment and is ignored by the Lua interpreter.
• print("Hello, World!"): This line calls the print function, which outputs the string "Hello, World!" to the console.

In this section, we introduced Lua, a lightweight, fast, and embeddable scripting language. We discussed its key features, history, and various use cases. We also compared Lua with other popular scripting languages and provided a simple example to get you started. In the next section, we will cover how to set up the Lua environment on your system.

Continue to Setting Up the Lua Environment.