Lua has other
advantages besides being fast and simple: It provides some
nice primitives for building up domain-specific languages of sorts,
leading to very compact scripts, and is also brain-dead easy to embed
into C or C++.
I loved Lua on PalmOS. Plua was a joy to write apps in, but it came along
too late.
Here's one for Lua fans that I just stumbled on:
"How the embeddability of Lua impacted its design"