Its fairly bare metal. Its not like you're running "mine.tunnel" and it does all the work for you, you have to program every little detail of movement or activity. Its not like LUA or LUA inspired, it is LUA so you get functions and real control flow.
I find it mildly amusing to program for my mining turtle to dig a large transport tunnel for me and line it with torch on the wall every X blocks and double tracked rails along the bottom and collect the goodies for me. This is not exactly the pinnacle of software development, but it is fun, which is all that counts.
Its also fun to emulate quarries and deep mining operations with programmed turtles. They come in handy for weird automations also.
My son watched the now ancient direwolf20 youtube mod spotlight on computercraft but had no motivation to run it himself. He's more an arduino kid, which is OK I guess.
(just to save time, insert here "LUA is not a real programming language", and insert here "I don't care its more of a programming language than watching youtube unboxing videos")
Computercraft is not unique, its just the oldest and most widespread of its genre. Personally I'd like a LISP in minecraft. Hoist out the guts of computercraft and toss in a nice jvm lisp like clojure ... in my infinite spare time... Assuming someone else hasn't already...
Minetest might be cooler sooner than you think. Its hard to speak for the community, but most see it as only a matter of time before MS kills minecraft modding a monetization scheme or abandonment of the java platform or who knows, at which point the mod authors and players will be salivating for something like minetest. The problem with minetest is nobody mods it so you can't program a turtle in LUA on minetest, only minecraft.