> Lua itself is a truly beautiful language, though I understand this is not a popular opinion.
I think most people who actually use Lua come away marveling at its elegance and simplicity. The ones that don’t get stuck at “arrays start at 1?! What a garbage language!” In fact, this is a fairly good way to tell if someone has a well-reasoned opinion about Lua ;) (I will put up Go as a counter-example: “hurr durr no generics” is a meme complaint but it remains one once you actually use the language…)
I've used julia and lua and tend to think if people complain about indexes starting at 1 instead of C's offsets starting at 0, they can't be working on anything too difficult, because it just isn't a big issue in the grand scheme of things.
I think most people who actually use Lua come away marveling at its elegance and simplicity. The ones that don’t get stuck at “arrays start at 1?! What a garbage language!” In fact, this is a fairly good way to tell if someone has a well-reasoned opinion about Lua ;) (I will put up Go as a counter-example: “hurr durr no generics” is a meme complaint but it remains one once you actually use the language…)