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Lua is a big reason why I'm interested in both systems and PL today. I started using Lua to build game mods in high school, and I was struck by how simple it was compared with Java, or even Python that I had tried learning earlier. The all-encompassing "everything is a table" paradigm really sparked my interest in the design of systems of computation, and how a broad range of programing patterns could be expressed with a few primitives.

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You might find Isle interesting (https://github.com/gvx/isle). It is a small programming language I've designed and implemented a couple of years ago heavily inspired by Lua's "everything is a table". In it, a function call looks like a name concatenated to a table literal, and calling a function actually consists of creating that table and using it as the environment for the function.

I still think it contains some neat ideas and concepts, even though I would never actually use it for something practical.

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