Because some people disagree that Lua is nice language. Lean-ness is questionable, e.g. BrainFuck is much more &quot;lean&quot;, so what? MicroPython can be built to the same binary sizes as a typical Lua build, and yet offer more language features. Lua&#x27;s embedability has stronghold in games, that&#x27;s where it usually embedded. Embedded hardware systems are a little different beasts. For them, it&#x27;s helpful to differentiate e.g. integer from float number (Lua&#x27;s numbers are floats, it took Lua a long way to acquire a standard module to do bitwise operations, which some people consider just an ugly hack). Also, helpful to differentiate arrays with guaranteed O(1) access from dictionaries (Lua has some mutant container type about whose behavior you can never be sure).