As an alternative, though, there are several Rust-based scripting languages that attempt to expose some of the power of the type system, etc., while being more amenable to dynamic loading, REPL, etc:
Also the JS runtime is huge and the build system is complex. You can run Lua in ~400kb or less and LuaJIT tends to walk over any other jitted interpreted runtime.
It really is too bad that JavaScript is different from Lua. Lua predates it by 2 years. [1]
Criticizing a language on syntax is something I would hope we could move past. Mr Newman didn't read about the history and purpose of Lua, otherwise he would know it was targeted at scripting data loads for simulations written in Fortran. Hence the 1 based indexing. Lua syntax is one of its SELLING points.
++ mutates a variable in place, has non-trivial pre/post behaviour (many junior devs don't understand it), and its brevity causes it to be used inline, which results in complex one liners.
String concatenation using '+' is not considered to be a great feature in dynamically typed languages. When you can't guarantee the types of the operands, it can lead to unexpected results. Pass in two numbers, and it this returns the result of the sum. Pass in two strings, and they're concatenated.
'continue' is a strange one. I just don't use it, and I'm not sure why anyone thinks it adds anything. It's like an early return, in that it can cause some difficulty in code comprehension.
So it feels a little like Lua is being criticised for making some good calls.
goto continue
::continue::
Yes, one of the things Perl got very right, and yet it is still brought up by people as evidence of what makes Perl look like line noise (along with == vs eq, which is the same thing, even if the problem is less troublesome in that case).
> So it feels a little like Lua is being criticised for making some good calls.
All too often languages (and aspects of them) are criticized mistanely as being worse when all that is presented is how they are different. All too often we vilify the unusual just for being unusual.