Lua is the programming language created by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes in 1993.
The three researchers developed Lua at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. Its name means “moon” in Portuguese, and the language was designed as a small, embeddable scripting language.
Lua is implemented in portable C and is often embedded inside larger applications. Its simple syntax, small runtime, tables, and first-class functions make it useful for configuration, automation, and user-created extensions.
Lua is prominent in games, embedded devices, and tools. It is sometimes confused with Luau, a Lua-derived language used by Roblox; Luau extends Lua and is not identical to the original language.