A Lua lang intro
(FOR RUBYSTS)
Sebastián Moreno
R&D @ inConcert
@kernelp4nic

Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language.
Lua was created in 1993 by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes, members of the Computer Graphics Technology Group (Tecgraf) at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil.
If you need more speed, try LuaJIT http://luajit.org/
Source code and docs takes 246K compressed and 960K uncompressed. The source contains around 20000 lines of C.

lua_package_path '/foo/bar/?.lua;/blah/?.lua;;';
lua_package_cpath '/bar/baz/?.so;/blah/blah/?.so;;';
server {
location / {
lua_need_request_body on;
client_max_body_size 100k;
client_body_buffer_size 100k;
access_by_lua '
-- check the client IP address is in our black list
if ngx.var.remote_addr == "132.5.72.3" then
ngx.exit(ngx.HTTP_FORBIDDEN)
end
-- check if the request body contains bad words
if ngx.var.request_body and
string.match(ngx.var.request_body, "fsck")
then
return ngx.redirect("/terms_of_use.html")
end
-- tests passed
';
# proxy_pass/fastcgi_pass/etc settings
}
}

redis 127.0.0.1:6379> SCRIPT LOAD "return 'hello meetup'" => "cc834f607fb5249665c1f99c4daa71903768c575" redis 127.0.0.1:6379> EVALSHA cc834f607fb5249665c1f99c4daa71903768c575 0=> "hello meetup"
redis 127.0.0.1:6379> eval "return redis.call('set','foo','bar')" 0 OKredis 127.0.0.1:6379> keys * 1) "foo"redis 127.0.0.1:6379> eval "return redis.call('get','foo')" 0 "bar"
World Of Warcraft
League of Legends
Minecraft
local http = require('luanode.http')
http.createServer(function(self, request, response)
response:writeHead(200, {["Content-Type"] = "text/plain"})
response:finish("Hello Ruby Meetup!")
end):listen(8080)
console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8080/')
process:loop()

You can apply Lua philosophy to your actual code.
You don't need to drop your current lang,you just need to find the perfect time to use a tool.