By Design — Episode 06 In 1993, three engineers at PUC-Rio's Tecgraf laboratory had a problem. Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company, ran software on every kind of machine it owned, and the configuration files for that software were a mess. The team had two existing prototypes: DEL, a "data-entry language", and Sol, a "simple object language" used as a configuration format. Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo and Waldemar Celes met in mid-1993 and concluded that the two languages could be replaced by a single, more powerful one. They named the result Lua: "moon" in Portuguese, because Sol meant "sun" and the joke was difficult to resist. Lua was not born as a scripting language. It was born as a configuration language. The scripting came later, and the table syntax that made the scripting language pleasant was the same table syntax that had been designed for configuration in the first place. That is the entire foundation of the argument that follows.…