Currently, many programming languages are concerned with how to help you write programs with hundreds of thousands of lines. For that, they offer you packages, namespaces, complex type systems, a myriad of constructions, and thousands of documentation pages to be studied.

Lua does not try to help you write programs with hundreds of thousands of lines. Instead, Lua tries to help you solve your problem with only hundreds of lines, or even less. To achieve this aim, Lua relies on extensibility, like many other languages. Unlike most other languages, however, Lua is easily extended not only with software written in Lua itself, but also with software written in other languages, such as C and C++.