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One of the most popular and compelling real world uses of Lua is for embedded scripting. It's easy to embed, it's easy to use, for a scripting language it's blazing fast.

I'm sure Lua has other sweet spots, but that's the one I'm most familiar with.

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I've mostly experienced it through World of Warcraft -- it's embedded there as the language used to write the game's user interface[1]. Then it's exposed to third-party authors as an API, so they can write addons for the game.

It's also embedded in Wikipedia[2]. Complex templates can be written with Lua modules, rather than relying on wikitext.

[1]: http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/World_of_Warcraft_API

[2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Scribunto

I was introduced to Lua via writing a Wireshark plugin for packet verification. It was hard in the beginning but dove right into working with a C backend. I'd say that's an approachable side project if you want to explore Lua.

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