Dude, you can find a reason to write off every language in existence. Lisp has all those parens. Python has the whitespace. Perl...is Perl. Etc. Nothing's perfe

Dude, you can find a reason to write off every language in existence. Lisp has all those parens. Python has the whitespace. Perl...is Perl. Etc. Nothing's perfect. Lua's a pretty good language, though. It's completely replaced Python as my default language (much like Python replaced Perl years before), because, while it too has its surface annoyances, it makes a lot of other very intelligent trade-offs. For example, indexing arrays from 1 is a consequence of ensuring that Lua would have a syntactic subset usable as a data description language by non-programmers. It's almost identical to Javascript's JSON in that regard, but has been used in production as such for well over a decade. Likewise, Lua's rather spare standard library is because the language strictly* limits itself to the ANSI C standard. In exchange, though, it's portable to literally anything with an ANSI C compiler, including freaking Legos (http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/lego/pbLua/ http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/lego/pbLua/). The whole thing fits in a 200ish KB library, too. Not bad for something as expressive as Scheme and Python. * With the exception of dynamic linking, which can potentially provide everything else down the line.