[carterschonwald]

The hopl paper on lua seems to indicate it came out of a Brazil university. https://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf

[airstrike]

Indeed. It was created at PUC-Rio, my alma mater

[tomjakubowski]

Lua means moon in Portuguese! (cognate of Luna)

[winrid]

and there is also moonscript which transpiles to Lua!