Comment by aeturnum

I have really enjoyed working with Lua when it's come up and I think it's an extremely good language. In particular, as Noë says, its interface for embedding into C/C++ is clean and flexible. There are performance concerns, but considering how widely Lua is used for game logic in high performance video games clearly those concerns can be addressed.

That said, I think there are other warts that can be confusing and make the language difficult. The Nil-Terminated Arrays section points out one oddity about `nil` - but there are many others. There are a number of confusing corner cases (or were - I haven't used it in a while). As an example, if you have a list of values and you pass that list into a new table, the resulting table may be different than if you add each value in that list in order.

I also think that the flexibility of embedding means that you are often learning the Lua <=> C interface as much as you are learning Lua. So jumping from deploy to deploy is more confusing than most languages.

Nevertheless I fully agree the language is underrated!