Calvin rose, the author of fennel is a really great programmer and an even better language designer. Personally, i dont use or like lua, but I'm a big fan of one of his other projects, janet[0]
As a big fan of both Lua _and_ Janet, I'll just point out that a lot of what makes Janet nice and interesting are in fact inspired by Lua. Tables, fibers (coroutines), prototypes (metatables/metamethods), custom module loaders, a lot of the API, the peg parser (LPEG), etc etc. I understand no language is for everyone, but the influence can be felt throughout Janet if you're familiar with both.