You misunderstood me. I love lua and I wasn't being dismissive of it, I was using the first example that came to my mind to counter the claim that a convenient

You misunderstood me. I love lua and I wasn't being dismissive of it, I was using the first example that came to my mind to counter the claim that a convenient language has to be messy. Just because that was the example used doens't mean there is an implicit "and that's the only thing it's good for" clause I'm implying there: if someone said "Python is used by scientists utterly uninterested in programming to express numerical algorithms" would you understand that to be a dismissive remark against Python ? Being used by non-programmers utterly uninterested in programming to solve problems is the highest honor any programming language can ever attain, because it means that the language is well-suited to the domain enough (or flexible enough to be made so) that describing problems in it is no different than writing thoughts or design documents in natural language. This is the single most flattering thing you can ever say about a language, not a dismissive remark.