We’ve been embedding Lua in our Mac apps for a number of years now, driving an optimised, low-level engine, and it’s been a major win for us, both in terms of time and creativity.

As for LOC, well, yeah, it’s a completely worthless metric. There may indeed be more lines in a script, but the script often does more, much more, than the typical line of code in a low level language.

For example, the following single line of script:

table.insert(myTable, myObject);

There is no meaningful way to compare just how useful this is in comparision to a corresponding line in a low level language, except to say the ability to provide that functionality, as effectively part of the language, is a big win.

Simply put, using a scripting language (or whatever term you prefer) has allowed us to add application benefits (i.e. things that really benefit our customers) that would have been too hard or too costly to do in C++ or ObjC.