I have been learning about Lua in the past month and I'm absolutely in love with the language, but all I see around that is built with lua are games. I mean, the syntax is very simple, there is no fuss, no special meaning characters that makes code look like regex, has all the good things about a script language and integrates so painlessly with other languages like C, Java, etc. The only down-side I saw so far is the prototype based object orientation that some people do not like (or lack of OO built-in).

I do not see how ruby or python are better, surely not in performance ( http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=lua&lang2=python ). I was planning on writting a web app using lua with the Kepler framework and Javascript, but the lack of other projects that use lua as a web language makes me feel a bit uneasy since this is my first try with web development. Lua is considered a kids language, most of you on stackoverflow probably only know the language because of the WoW addons. I can't really see why that is...

http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaVersusPython this link provides some insights on Lua against Python, but this is clearly biased.