The paper below appeared today in Communications of the ACM: A Look at the Design of Lua Communications of the ACM, November 2018, Vol. 61 No. 11, Pages 114-123 https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/11/232214-a-look-at-the-design-of-lua/abstract https://doi.org/10.1145/3186277 It includes a short video: https://vimeo.com/292779036 The paper below also appeared in CACM in 2011 and complements the new paper: Passing a language through the eye of a needle http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1965724.1965739