As I said in a sibling comment, Lua isn't designed to be good for beginners, it's simple rather than easy. But I want to stand up for this, in particular. Beca

As I said in a sibling comment, Lua isn't designed to be good for beginners, it's simple rather than easy. But I want to stand up for this, in particular. Because in most languages, environments are magic: they're an exceptional thing that you work with in a special way, you're not expected to understand them, just use them. In Lua, an environment is... just a table! You can set an environment, read from it directly, assign it a metatable, and so on. So this is great for a beginner, once he gets past the hurdle. Just like `table.field` returns `nil` if there's no field field, `field` itself returns nil if there's no `_G.field`. Because _G.field and field itself are the same thing.