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Of the features to selectively take from Lua, the syntax is one I like. Pascal-style syntax does not have the statement separation issues a more expression-rich language like JavaScript has. It not only does not have statement separators, it is almost completely whitespace agnostic.

As a strategy to get adopters, it could also have value. There's a small but widely spread group of people who have been exposed to Lua in various games and programs.

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To me the killer language feature of Lua is tables, specifically being able to use ANYTHING as an index in a table. Really powerful. Its portability is its next feature.

Beyond that, I have grown to somewhat dislike Lua over the years due to the typical complaints, but also because it's tough to read and write. The keywords are so bulky and whitespace practices are random, requiring a linter. I actually like using brackets instead of do/then/end because brackets stand out more. When you're tossing functions around left and right, it's annoying to write out "local function" everywhere. I also am ambivalent about using metatables for implicit behavior that can be non-obvious to the code reader.

Unfortunately Wren adoption is practically nonexistent.

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