Actually Brian McCallister wrote much of the initial implementation, then called mod_wombat.. I just helped with various bits and kinda championed for including it in apache httpd.

I've used lua for several other projects, and I love its embedability, compared to any of the other language, nothing remotely close to mainstream is anywhere near it.

I'm most interested in seeing how LLVM based things go though, I imagine at somepoint you will be able to just embed LLVM JITs and run langauge X on them, though the API is gonna be complicated compared to Lua's.