In my experience, it took a bit of conceptual work to get used to the "Lua way", and that impedance mismatch would have been reduced if it shared more similarit

In my experience, it took a bit of conceptual work to get used to the "Lua way", and that impedance mismatch would have been reduced if it shared more similarities with the other languages we were working with. Context is important IMO; if you're going to using a language as your primary development tool, then you'll get over that hump fairly quickly, and my objection is less relevant. But for our use-case (embedding Lua in a C application to have user-provided scripts drive our C library's callback hooks), the developers were primarily working in C and Python, and so most of us didn't use Lua often enough to really click with it. For our use-case, something a bit closer to Python or Java would have been much easier to grok, and therefore would have made our development easier and more productive. "Easy and more productive" is all I'm really looking for in a language, always within the context of the specific usecase of course. I'd be fine with dropping most of the sugar in Python or Java, but I'd be surprised if there were no "zero-cost abstractions" that could be added to Lua without making it too heavyweight for embedding.