That was my experience with it too. I read the "Programming in Lua" book from cover to cover 10 years ago, and it remains one of my favorite programming books.

That was my experience with it too. I read the "Programming in Lua" book from cover to cover 10 years ago, and it remains one of my favorite programming books. There's a lot of great information in that book (not just about Lua). And I read a lot of their academic papers which taught me a lot about PL design and implementation. However whenever I try to program in Lua it feels both impoverished and verbose compared to Python. People complain about runtime errors in Python but Lua has even more of them. And the libraries are significantly worse for the same task.