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Lua is one of those things that is both simple and complex . . .
It's simple in that you can learn the basics really easily. It won't throw you off a cliff of mathematics like some other functional languages.
It's complex in that it does have some of the more advanced stuff. You just don't need to learn it in order to work with the language.
I think the biggest appeal to me is that it works with tables.
The great thing about tables is that they're fast and they're easily understood.
At the CPU level, a table indexed by numbers is just a lookup and a jump. A table indexed by strings is also very fast.
This is quite unlike a lot of other high level scripting languages where what you're doing is highly mathematical and is so unlike low level programming that the overhead of converting it to something the CPU understands cripples the performance of the language.
I think tables are also conceptually easy to understand - you have an index and you have a value. Easy for a human to remember, IMO.
For those reasons, I love the LUA language.
Not that there aren't weaknesses, though. LUA, especially the WoW implementation, isn't too keen on the information hiding concepts found in OOP languages. It tends to make a lot of stuff public by default, which can be a bit of a pain when names clash.
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