August 2, 2012 -- Dynamic languages have proved invaluable to improving fast and agile development, most notably for Web development and system administration. Some precursor languages such as Unix shells, Perl, or PHP have paved the way and remain widely used today. More modern, rationally structured languages such as Python and Ruby are now inescapable for people who want high productivity for tasks such as Web 2.0 development. However, these improvements haven't yet been widely adapted to software development for embedded devices. Although this adoption delay was once justified due to technical issues, based on our experience in machine-to-machine (M2M) communication systems, the Lua programming language is very well-suited to overcoming this historic reticence.

By Fabien Fleutot. (Fleutot is a technical expert at Sierra Wireless.)