Quotes

Here is a sample of what users have said about Lua over the years. Many of the quotes below appeared in spontaneous messages posted to USENET newsgroups. Others were sent to the mailing list or directly to us. The persons quoted below speak for themselves, not for their organizations. Some quotes have been slightly edited. Read also some press clippings about Lua.

“Creating such a clean, powerful, and compact programming language is a tremendous achievement, and great credit is due to the designers for their remarkable insight and skills.”
—Joseph Manning, in lua-l (2013). “Tcl did a lot of good in advancing the ideology of using scripting to build applications. It was the Lua of its era. But Lua is the Lua of this era.”
—Jay Carlson, in lua-l (2012).
“Grim Fandango was the first game that shows Lua could not only be used to make a good game, but that it could be used to make some of the best games ever.”
—Alex Lucard, in Diehard GameFAN: Hall of Fame Nomination – Grim Fandango (2010). “Brazil's most popular technology export is Lua.”
—in ITPRO (2010).

“As for Lua, it is a high performance scripting language. The high performance was the deciding factor, we needed a language that was fast, fast, fast. Also, it easily integrates to C++.”
—in a Blizzcon 2009 Q&A session.

“As a blind programmer, I really enjoy the Lua scripting language. It is one of the most speech friendly languages to read and write with a screen reader. Lua is also very fast, light and portable.”
—Veli-Pekka, about Dolphin scripting (2009).

“The key benefits unique to Lua are the fact that it is amazingly small, fast, and on a technical level a masterpiece. Not every project manages to achieve so much with so little of the dreaded 'bloat'.”
—MatthewWild, in lua-l (2008).

“I just wanted to thank you for this great scripting language! We were previously trying to embed Python but this introduced a lot of problems. After some research I found Lua which is exactly what we were looking for. The library compiled without any modifications and it took me only a few hours to write a Lua-wrapper for our data structure. Everything worked with the first try and no debugging was necessary because it behaved exactly as expected (and as described in the documentation) - amazing!”
—Alex Hartmann, of the Visionaire team (2007).

“What if you could provide a seamlessly integrated, fully dynamic language with a conventional syntax while increasing your application's size by less than 200K on an x86? You can do it with Lua!”
—Keith Fieldhouse, in ONLamp (2006).

“It is easy to see why Lua is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for game scripting.”
—Ian Millington, in Artificial Intelligence for Games, Morgan Kaufmann (2006).

“Before you create yet another configuration file or resource format (and yet another parser to accompany it), try Lua.”
—Martin Streicher, Editor-in-Chief, Linux Magazine, in developerWorks (2006).

“Emma is an application engine which interfaces to Ogre3D and uses Lua for scripting. We have done tests and have found that Lua can warp a 20,000 triangle mesh using a sine function at over 100 fps. No other interpreted language I have ever seen can get close to that.”
—Chris Marrin, in lua-l (2006).

“If you are ever tempted to put scripting into a program, run don't walk to www.lua.org and use it.”
—vze35, in comp.sys.mac.scitech (2006).

“We have integrated Lua into our network monitor and we are seeing a boom of new programmers among our users.”
—Robert Aronsson, Intellipool AB, Sweden (2005).

“It's quite possible that game developers will look back at the 2000s as the decade of Lua".
—Matthew Harmon, in "Building Lua into games", Game Programming Gems 5 (2005).

“All games have a scripting layer of some kind. The Lua language is the leading candidate for this role.”
—Phlip, in comp.games.development.design (2004).

“Lua is probably one of most portable and unintrusive coding tools around in the C world.”
—cliki.tunes.org (2004).

“Thanks for delivering the most error-free opensource project I have ever used.”
—Erik Hougaard, in lua-l (2004).

“I haven't been more amazed by the design of a language since I saw that of C.”
—Dimitris Papavasiliou, in lua-l (2004).

“Lua was the answer to my prayers.”
—Gavin Wraith, in his wiki page (2002).

“Lua is a brilliant, tiny powerhouse.”
—Lucas Ackerman, in rec.games.roguelike.development (2003).

“Lua is a splendid piece of software, IMHO – very clean language design, powerful through its reflexivity, nice API. The documentation is a pleasure to read. Would that all software were as neat as Lua! Frankly, I was amazed and delighted.”
—Francis Burton, in comp.compilers (1996).

“I want to gratulate the Angband maintainers for their choice of Lua. I've seldom seen a component or subsystem that could be integrated that smoothly and without problems.”
—Hansjörg Malthaner, in rec.games.roguelike.angband (2002).

“I'm using Lua to glue together astronomical imaging routines. I'm very impressed with Lua and found that the elegance of the language, the simplicity of the interface to C, and the quality of the documentation made it very easy to learn to use. Thank you all very much for such a useful tool!”
—Alan Watson, New Mexico State University in Las Cruces (1997).

“Forget about Basic and go for Lua! Lua is just as easy to use, but a lot more powerful. Lua is also very easy to extend.”
—Jon Kleiser, in comp.sys.mac.programmer.help (1999).

“This Lua language looks very interesting. I've been looking forward to a small, portable prototype-based like language and this may be it.”
—Steve Dekorte (1997).

“Lua - The most useful piece of truly free software I've ever used.”
—David Jeske, in his list of recommended products (2000?).

“This fine, little, free scripting engine is one of the most reusable parts in software industry I ever found. I could not imagine any better way of incorporating a scripting system into a game engine than this one.”
—Harald Nowak, in the Station 5 web site.

“If you want a simple but fast (and small!) scripting language, I would suggest that you take a look at Lua.”
—James Logajan, in comp.lang.python (1997).

“If you really want to learn about elegance and power in the design of little languages, take a look at the papers published about Lua and study the source code. Neat!”
—Francis Burton, in comp.compilers (1996).

“Lua is a small and neat scripting language from Brazilian academics. It's a refreshing break from scripting monsters like Perl or Python. This one is quite elegant and nicely compact.”
—Franck Arnaud, in his links page (1999?).

“Lua is the simplest/most complete object implementation I've found.”
—John Roll, Harvard University (1995).

“Lua is the most elegant language that I've stumbled on in many years, and it is by far the simplest to learn and to use.”
—Eduardo Ochs, in lua-l (2001).

“Among the large number of [scripting] languages, only Lua proved to be simple, portable and powerful enough to meet our requirements.”
—pdelib Team, Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics, in their list of tools (1999?).

“Lua looks like a pretty decent and small language, "Tcl done right" is what immediately came to mind (or possibly "Python-Lite").”
—Jack Jansen, in comp.lang.python (1997).

“After reading the Dr. Dobbs article on Lua I was very eager to check it out, and so far it has exceeded my expectations in every way! Its elegance and simplicity astound me. Congratulations on developing such a well-thought out language.”
—Bret Mogilefsky, LucasArts (1997).

“I've been using Lua for a while now and can easily recommend it as an embedded language - much "cleaner" in my opinion than some other options, such as Tcl or Perl. It's also very small/lightweight, one of the fastest around, well documented, and easily bound with C functions.”
—David Bollinger, in rec.games.roguelike.development (1999).

“I've just ported Lua, a dynamic extensible embeddable language, to RISC OS. Thanks to the beautifully ANSI code, Lua was delightfully easy to port, needing only some makefile hacking because of RISC OS oddities.”
—Reuben Thomas, in comp.sys.acorn.announce (1999).

“The Lua scripting module works very well as an embedded scripting language engine [in the Zeus editor].”
—Jussi Jumppanen, in comp.programming (1999).

“Lua is a very small, very fast, extensible language.”
—Jon Kleiser, in comp.sys.mac.programmer.tools (1999).

“About a year ago I was in the position to make suggestions for a scripting language in an embedded application to my ex-employer, with a main focus on immediate availability. I chose Lua, Scheme, Tcl 7.6, Python (in this order), but [would] have loved to see Python in a better rank. Unfortunately the porting effort seemed quite high.”
—Stefan Franke, in comp.lang.python (1999).

“My favourite scripting language is Lua. Lua, written in C, has its roots in Unix, but it's easily ported to Mac OS, Windows xx, BeOS, and others. Lua is small, fast, and very capable.”
—Jon Kleiser, in comp.lang.oberon (1998).

“I originally planned to use Python as my embedded scripting language before turning to Lua. I read the Nutshell book, lurked the mailing list for 4-5 months, downloaded the last 2 versions and wrote several Python scripts. After all of that preparation, I abandoned Python for Lua. Lua is lighter [and] is easier to embed. So, bottom line, if you need what Python's got, go for it, but if you want easy embedding, Lua's the right tool.”
—Ashley Fryer, in comp.ai.games (1998).

“If you're looking for a really small and really cool extension language, have a look at Lua.”
—Lyn Headley, in comp.lang.python (1998).

“If you compare Scheme and Lua for the things you'd want in a game console scripting language, I think Lua will come out ahead. It's smaller, portable, uses less memory, and is faster.”
—Steve Dekorte, in comp.lang.objective-c (1997).

“I recently downloaded the source of both [the] compiler and interpreter [for Lua], and I was very positively surprised by its quality. It compiled on my Mac without as much as a warning, and ran first time! It definitely deserves to be checked out.”
—Mike Fahl, in comp.arch.embedded (1997).

“My advice... save yourself a lot of pain and use Lua. Lua is a small, powerful, efficient scripting language. It was written specifically as an extension language and it's very good. I haven't seen any language (including Python) which is a better choice for embedding.
Lua is a truly wonderful language - clean, small, efficient, and free for commercial use. It's very solid code (current version 3.1), used in many industrial applications. It's also well supported.
One of the things I like best about it is that I can't think of any way to improve it. If I had decided to write a scripting language for myself, I doubt mine would be as good. For the record, the original Lua code base was generated with flex/bison or lex/yacc, and evolved from there. So, if you're planning on going the flex/bison route, save yourself 3 years of refinement and use Lua.”
—Ashley Fryer, in rec.games.programmer (1998).

“After the article in 'Software, P. & E.' you must have had a lot of responses. Everyone with some knowledge of computer languages will have been struck by the original concepts of the language.”
—W.Boeke, Lucent Technologies, the Netherlands (1996).

“I have read it all, and have gone through the implementation as well. What is amazing to me is what is missing. It feels like Lua is a sort of an updated AWK: it is quite elegant and to the point. Quite an extraordinary piece of work.”
—Dwight VandenBergh (1996).

“Congratulations on Lua. It was exactly what I was looking for, and I've been using it as my primary script language for a month and a half now. It's powerful, small, and very easy to use (and expand upon). Good luck with it. I'd recommend the language to anyone.”
—Joshua Jensen (1996).

“I have been using interpreters in my code since the early 80s for testing and prototyping and to add a macro language...so far [Lua] looks like the best I have seen and I have tried most everything around during that time.”
—Rodney A. Ludwig (1996).

“I downloaded Lua in December, after reading about it in Dr. Dobbs Journal. I found Lua to be remarkably easy to compile and integrate into an application. In less than a week, I have integrated Lua and provided an interface to a specialized database. Originally, I though the task of providing a macro language would take months.”
—Mike Palmer (1997).

“For some time now I've been looking for a portable, compact interpreted or incrementally compiled language to use in various robotic applications. I think Lua is going to be just what I need!”
—Mark Ian Barlow, Non-Linear Control Consultants Ltd (1997).

“I would say that Lua the language is pretty much perfect – at least, very difficult to change without detracting from its elegant design.”
—Francis Burton, University of Glasgow, in lua-l (1997).

“I'm now happily using Lua for the sort of tasks where others often use Perl. I struggled with Perl for a couple of years [...] and never learnt enough to make use of its many cunning bits of magic. Lua was much easier to learn (the entire manual being only 40 pages helps!), and there's no magic, just a simple, small, powerful language, with well-designed standard libraries.”
—Reuben Thomas (2000).

“Learn it at once. It's lovely.”
—Rob Kendrick, in comp.sys.acorn.programmer (2000).

“I'm not so happy with Tcl as language design, and for C I think Lua does a better job than Tcl.”
—Norman Ramsey, in comp.lang.ml (1997).

“I use Lua because I like the language more than C++.”
—Paul Bleisch, in rec.games.programmer (1998).

“Creating such a clean, powerful, and compact programming language is a tremendous achievement, and great credit is due to the designers for their remarkable insight and skills.” —Joseph Manning, in lua-l (2013).	“Tcl did a lot of good in advancing the ideology of using scripting to build applications. It was the Lua of its era. But Lua is the Lua of this era.” —Jay Carlson, in lua-l (2012).
“Grim Fandango was the first game that shows Lua could not only be used to make a good game, but that it could be used to make some of the best games ever.” —Alex Lucard, in Diehard GameFAN: Hall of Fame Nomination – Grim Fandango (2010).	“Brazil's most popular technology export is Lua.” —in ITPRO (2010).
“As for Lua, it is a high performance scripting language. The high performance was the deciding factor, we needed a language that was fast, fast, fast. Also, it easily integrates to C++.” —in a Blizzcon 2009 Q&A session.	“As a blind programmer, I really enjoy the Lua scripting language. It is one of the most speech friendly languages to read and write with a screen reader. Lua is also very fast, light and portable.” —Veli-Pekka, about Dolphin scripting (2009).
“The key benefits unique to Lua are the fact that it is amazingly small, fast, and on a technical level a masterpiece. Not every project manages to achieve so much with so little of the dreaded 'bloat'.” —MatthewWild, in lua-l (2008).	“I just wanted to thank you for this great scripting language! We were previously trying to embed Python but this introduced a lot of problems. After some research I found Lua which is exactly what we were looking for. The library compiled without any modifications and it took me only a few hours to write a Lua-wrapper for our data structure. Everything worked with the first try and no debugging was necessary because it behaved exactly as expected (and as described in the documentation) - amazing!” —Alex Hartmann, of the Visionaire team (2007).
“What if you could provide a seamlessly integrated, fully dynamic language with a conventional syntax while increasing your application's size by less than 200K on an x86? You can do it with Lua!” —Keith Fieldhouse, in ONLamp (2006).	“It is easy to see why Lua is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for game scripting.” —Ian Millington, in Artificial Intelligence for Games, Morgan Kaufmann (2006).
“Before you create yet another configuration file or resource format (and yet another parser to accompany it), try Lua.” —Martin Streicher, Editor-in-Chief, Linux Magazine, in developerWorks (2006).	“Emma is an application engine which interfaces to Ogre3D and uses Lua for scripting. We have done tests and have found that Lua can warp a 20,000 triangle mesh using a sine function at over 100 fps. No other interpreted language I have ever seen can get close to that.” —Chris Marrin, in lua-l (2006).
“If you are ever tempted to put scripting into a program, run don't walk to www.lua.org and use it.” —vze35, in comp.sys.mac.scitech (2006).	“We have integrated Lua into our network monitor and we are seeing a boom of new programmers among our users.” —Robert Aronsson, Intellipool AB, Sweden (2005).
“It's quite possible that game developers will look back at the 2000s as the decade of Lua". —Matthew Harmon, in "Building Lua into games", Game Programming Gems 5 (2005).	“All games have a scripting layer of some kind. The Lua language is the leading candidate for this role.” —Phlip, in comp.games.development.design (2004).
“Lua is probably one of most portable and unintrusive coding tools around in the C world.” —cliki.tunes.org (2004).	“Thanks for delivering the most error-free opensource project I have ever used.” —Erik Hougaard, in lua-l (2004).
“I haven't been more amazed by the design of a language since I saw that of C.” —Dimitris Papavasiliou, in lua-l (2004).	“Lua was the answer to my prayers.” —Gavin Wraith, in his wiki page (2002).
“Lua is a brilliant, tiny powerhouse.” —Lucas Ackerman, in rec.games.roguelike.development (2003).	“Lua is a splendid piece of software, IMHO – very clean language design, powerful through its reflexivity, nice API. The documentation is a pleasure to read. Would that all software were as neat as Lua! Frankly, I was amazed and delighted.” —Francis Burton, in comp.compilers (1996).
“I want to gratulate the Angband maintainers for their choice of Lua. I've seldom seen a component or subsystem that could be integrated that smoothly and without problems.” —Hansjörg Malthaner, in rec.games.roguelike.angband (2002).	“I'm using Lua to glue together astronomical imaging routines. I'm very impressed with Lua and found that the elegance of the language, the simplicity of the interface to C, and the quality of the documentation made it very easy to learn to use. Thank you all very much for such a useful tool!” —Alan Watson, New Mexico State University in Las Cruces (1997).
“Forget about Basic and go for Lua! Lua is just as easy to use, but a lot more powerful. Lua is also very easy to extend.” —Jon Kleiser, in comp.sys.mac.programmer.help (1999).	“This Lua language looks very interesting. I've been looking forward to a small, portable prototype-based like language and this may be it.” —Steve Dekorte (1997).
“Lua - The most useful piece of truly free software I've ever used.” —David Jeske, in his list of recommended products (2000?).	“This fine, little, free scripting engine is one of the most reusable parts in software industry I ever found. I could not imagine any better way of incorporating a scripting system into a game engine than this one.” —Harald Nowak, in the Station 5 web site.
“If you want a simple but fast (and small!) scripting language, I would suggest that you take a look at Lua.” —James Logajan, in comp.lang.python (1997).	“If you really want to learn about elegance and power in the design of little languages, take a look at the papers published about Lua and study the source code. Neat!” —Francis Burton, in comp.compilers (1996).
“Lua is a small and neat scripting language from Brazilian academics. It's a refreshing break from scripting monsters like Perl or Python. This one is quite elegant and nicely compact.” —Franck Arnaud, in his links page (1999?).	“Lua is the simplest/most complete object implementation I've found.” —John Roll, Harvard University (1995).
“Lua is the most elegant language that I've stumbled on in many years, and it is by far the simplest to learn and to use.” —Eduardo Ochs, in lua-l (2001).	“Among the large number of [scripting] languages, only Lua proved to be simple, portable and powerful enough to meet our requirements.” —pdelib Team, Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics, in their list of tools (1999?).
“Lua looks like a pretty decent and small language, "Tcl done right" is what immediately came to mind (or possibly "Python-Lite").” —Jack Jansen, in comp.lang.python (1997).	“After reading the Dr. Dobbs article on Lua I was very eager to check it out, and so far it has exceeded my expectations in every way! Its elegance and simplicity astound me. Congratulations on developing such a well-thought out language.” —Bret Mogilefsky, LucasArts (1997).
“I've been using Lua for a while now and can easily recommend it as an embedded language - much "cleaner" in my opinion than some other options, such as Tcl or Perl. It's also very small/lightweight, one of the fastest around, well documented, and easily bound with C functions.” —David Bollinger, in rec.games.roguelike.development (1999).	“I've just ported Lua, a dynamic extensible embeddable language, to RISC OS. Thanks to the beautifully ANSI code, Lua was delightfully easy to port, needing only some makefile hacking because of RISC OS oddities.” —Reuben Thomas, in comp.sys.acorn.announce (1999).
“The Lua scripting module works very well as an embedded scripting language engine [in the Zeus editor].” —Jussi Jumppanen, in comp.programming (1999).	“Lua is a very small, very fast, extensible language.” —Jon Kleiser, in comp.sys.mac.programmer.tools (1999).
“About a year ago I was in the position to make suggestions for a scripting language in an embedded application to my ex-employer, with a main focus on immediate availability. I chose Lua, Scheme, Tcl 7.6, Python (in this order), but [would] have loved to see Python in a better rank. Unfortunately the porting effort seemed quite high.” —Stefan Franke, in comp.lang.python (1999).	“My favourite scripting language is Lua. Lua, written in C, has its roots in Unix, but it's easily ported to Mac OS, Windows xx, BeOS, and others. Lua is small, fast, and very capable.” —Jon Kleiser, in comp.lang.oberon (1998).
“I originally planned to use Python as my embedded scripting language before turning to Lua. I read the Nutshell book, lurked the mailing list for 4-5 months, downloaded the last 2 versions and wrote several Python scripts. After all of that preparation, I abandoned Python for Lua. Lua is lighter [and] is easier to embed. So, bottom line, if you need what Python's got, go for it, but if you want easy embedding, Lua's the right tool.” —Ashley Fryer, in comp.ai.games (1998).	“If you're looking for a really small and really cool extension language, have a look at Lua.” —Lyn Headley, in comp.lang.python (1998).
“If you compare Scheme and Lua for the things you'd want in a game console scripting language, I think Lua will come out ahead. It's smaller, portable, uses less memory, and is faster.” —Steve Dekorte, in comp.lang.objective-c (1997).	“I recently downloaded the source of both [the] compiler and interpreter [for Lua], and I was very positively surprised by its quality. It compiled on my Mac without as much as a warning, and ran first time! It definitely deserves to be checked out.” —Mike Fahl, in comp.arch.embedded (1997).
“My advice... save yourself a lot of pain and use Lua. Lua is a small, powerful, efficient scripting language. It was written specifically as an extension language and it's very good. I haven't seen any language (including Python) which is a better choice for embedding. Lua is a truly wonderful language - clean, small, efficient, and free for commercial use. It's very solid code (current version 3.1), used in many industrial applications. It's also well supported. One of the things I like best about it is that I can't think of any way to improve it. If I had decided to write a scripting language for myself, I doubt mine would be as good. For the record, the original Lua code base was generated with flex/bison or lex/yacc, and evolved from there. So, if you're planning on going the flex/bison route, save yourself 3 years of refinement and use Lua.” —Ashley Fryer, in rec.games.programmer (1998).	“After the article in 'Software, P. & E.' you must have had a lot of responses. Everyone with some knowledge of computer languages will have been struck by the original concepts of the language.” —W.Boeke, Lucent Technologies, the Netherlands (1996).
“I have read it all, and have gone through the implementation as well. What is amazing to me is what is missing. It feels like Lua is a sort of an updated AWK: it is quite elegant and to the point. Quite an extraordinary piece of work.” —Dwight VandenBergh (1996).	“Congratulations on Lua. It was exactly what I was looking for, and I've been using it as my primary script language for a month and a half now. It's powerful, small, and very easy to use (and expand upon). Good luck with it. I'd recommend the language to anyone.” —Joshua Jensen (1996).
“I have been using interpreters in my code since the early 80s for testing and prototyping and to add a macro language...so far [Lua] looks like the best I have seen and I have tried most everything around during that time.” —Rodney A. Ludwig (1996).	“I downloaded Lua in December, after reading about it in Dr. Dobbs Journal. I found Lua to be remarkably easy to compile and integrate into an application. In less than a week, I have integrated Lua and provided an interface to a specialized database. Originally, I though the task of providing a macro language would take months.” —Mike Palmer (1997).
“For some time now I've been looking for a portable, compact interpreted or incrementally compiled language to use in various robotic applications. I think Lua is going to be just what I need!” —Mark Ian Barlow, Non-Linear Control Consultants Ltd (1997).	“I would say that Lua the language is pretty much perfect – at least, very difficult to change without detracting from its elegant design.” —Francis Burton, University of Glasgow, in lua-l (1997).
“I'm now happily using Lua for the sort of tasks where others often use Perl. I struggled with Perl for a couple of years [...] and never learnt enough to make use of its many cunning bits of magic. Lua was much easier to learn (the entire manual being only 40 pages helps!), and there's no magic, just a simple, small, powerful language, with well-designed standard libraries.” —Reuben Thomas (2000).	“Learn it at once. It's lovely.” —Rob Kendrick, in comp.sys.acorn.programmer (2000).
“I'm not so happy with Tcl as language design, and for C I think Lua does a better job than Tcl.” —Norman Ramsey, in comp.lang.ml (1997).	“I use Lua because I like the language more than C++.” —Paul Bleisch, in rec.games.programmer (1998).