Lua is among the most used languages in existence.
It's probably the most used language by under-21-year-olds, and almost certainly so for under 16. Roblox is absolutely enormous.
It's the usual choice of embedded scripting language, so a great number of programmers who don't use it as a daily driver, nonetheless learn it to modify this or that program. Being a very simple, minimalist language, this is easy to do.
It's true that it's missing some affordances which you'll find in larger (and frequently less efficient) languages. You'll end up doing more iteration and setting of metatables. That bothers some people more than others. These are the tradeoffs one must accept, to get a 70KiB binary which fits in an L1 cache while being multiples faster than e.g. Python or Ruby.
Lua is among the most used languages in existence.
It's probably the most used language by under-21-year-olds, and almost certainly so for under 16. Roblox is absolutely enormous.
It's the usual choice of embedded scripting language, so a great number of programmers who don't use it as a daily driver, nonetheless learn it to modify this or that program. Being a very simple, minimalist language, this is easy to do.
It's true that it's missing some affordances which you'll find in larger (and frequently less efficient) languages. You'll end up doing more iteration and setting of metatables. That bothers some people more than others. These are the tradeoffs one must accept, to get a 70KiB binary which fits in an L1 cache while being multiples faster than e.g. Python or Ruby.