Comment by danbreuer

I disagree for the same reason -- how quickly the language can be picked up and used productively. Due to Lua's small footprint, a novice user can skim through the Lua docs and walk away with a useful mental model for most of the language.

This is not the case for Javascript, which has far more syntax and many duplicated subtly-different features (var/let, class/plain objects, this definition depending on lambda syntax). Not something easily grasped by a new user.

And sure, there are many Javascript snippets floating around and its possible to pick up some subset of Javascript by osmosis. However, this approach leads to a "poke it with a stick until it works, while understanding nothing and slowly going mad" UX from what I've seen. Which is not something I would aim for in the kind of productivity tools embedded scripting languages are used in.-- I find these tools are far more satisfying and productive to use when you have a simple mental model which clicks in place after a bit of effort up front, letting you work after without having to consult docs for every step.

(Of course this is not an issue if you're targetting only developers proficient with Javascript as users, but this is not the case for most applications outside of the webdev space.)