title: Lua as a general-purpose scripting language?
body: <p>When I see Lua, the only thing I ever read is "great for embedding", "fast", "lightweight" and more often than anything else: "World of Warcraft" or in short "WoW".</p>
  
  <p>Why is it limited to embedding the whole thing into another application? Why not write general-purpose scripts like you do with Python or Perl?</p>
  
  <p>Lua seems to be doing great in aspects like speed and memory-usage (The fastest scripting language afaik) so why is it that I never see Lua being used as a "Desktop scripting-language" to automate tasks? For example:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Renaming a bunch of files</li>
  <li>Download some files from the web</li>
  <li>Webscraping</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Is it the lack of the standard library?</p>