Lua is a powerful and intuitive general-purpose programming language developed in 1993 by a team of scrappy professors at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil.

Due to a trade barrier on computer hardware and software at the time, the team couldn’t buy software from outside the country. So they made their own!

Much of the inspiration for Lua came from the languages SOL (Simple Object Language) and DEL (data-entry language). In Portuguese, Sol means “sun” and Lua means “moon”.

Despite its humble beginnings, Lua is now used for:

• Building games, such as Roblox, World of Warcraft, and Angry Birds
• Building web apps, such as Venmo and Adobe
• Building developer tools within companies such as Redis

Lua has an easy-to-read, Python-like syntax, it takes up very little space on your machine, and it can interoperate with any C code.

In this lesson, we’ll start by learning the basic concepts and fundamentals of Lua.

Happy coding!