I think the most compelling thing about Lua (to someone with no Lua experience), is that its appears (from examples, and what people have said) that its good for embedding inside another program (size wise and good FFI).

In a video I saw, by one of the designers of the languages stated that this was the original purpose (engineers using this instead of C, with the low level details done by programming team in C).

Indeed, C(++) interop is easy. The API is also described in the PiL Book linked above.

Furthermore, the VM binary weights 200k. It is extremely portable (it uses the common subset of C89 and C++), and its code is a pleasure to hack.

Just had a quick skim over some of that chapter, and it is very compelling, especially when I see how well its worked for AwesomeWM (my desktop environment of choice) and how many commercial games are using it for user scripting [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lua-scripted_video_gam...

Java having lots of jobs isnt a good metric, because theres lots of jobs also means theres lots of people applying, in fact I would say a good reason to not use Java would be to simply weed away (some) people applying

From an excuse point of view, its definitely a metric for a 'good' programmer 'without' a job.

I would highly recommend against selecting a technology because you want to weed out applicants who are misfits. A better option would be to have a strong hiring process.

It might be my relative newness to software, but I enjoy looking at other peoples code to see what works (pick up new language features) and what doesnt.

Arch Linux - Rolling release, minimal, and great community

Same, wrote one for an assignment in a couple of hours, wasnt remotely a good idea to use it in the real world thou