I've been looking into building a basic game engine from the ground up and after making a list of features that are common to other engines, one of the bigger things is the fact that they have an embedded scripting language like lua or python.
My question is how is an embedded scripting language superior to just making a header file (or something of the like) that the user can include in a c++ file which gives them access to many of the functions and states. I'm sure there's a very good answer out there, I just haven't stumbled on it yet.
Also beyond why it's needed, what are languages like lua used for in things like game engines?