As a Lua proponent, I'll say that it's simple, small and easy to embed in an application. That's worth a lot, and I do think there are solutions that are much e

As a Lua proponent, I'll say that it's simple, small and easy to embed in an application. That's worth a lot, and I do think there are solutions that are much easier to express in Lua than in e.g. C. Compared to JavaScript, there are very few surprises, which I think is where people wishing for its replacement are coming from. My gripes with the language are probably common: no arithmetic-assignment operators like "+=", no real arrays, few array-like operations built-in, array-like tables' first index is 1, no integer type... Maybe some of your frustrations come from the characteristics of the PICO-8 API and its development environment. It leans on you to implement a lot of basic game logic in a single file, and if you're editing within PICO-8, you only have a basic text editor with a 128x128 pixel looking glass view into that file. I find that Lua works best when you offload a lot of the gritty logic to the host application and use Lua mostly as a glue language, but in PICO-8 the opposite mostly seems to work to its advantage because it's more approachable to newbies with its small, obvious API surface and all-in-one development environment.