I used to like Lua a lot...

https://garry.tv/2014/08/16/i-fell-out-of-love-with-lua/
I used to like Lua a lot and now I don’t. I think anyone intending to add a scripting language to their game/engine should seriously consider using Javascript instead.

Javascript is used all over the web. It’s only going to end up getting used more and more. Google, Mozilla and Microsoft are all working to make it faster and faster.

Ultimately if we have to teach people a scripting language, lets teach them a language that will serve them in the future. Sure the jump from Lua to Javascript isn’t that great, but if you skip Lua there’s no need to make a jump at all.

>>12

I'm not talking about memory or complexity, I'm talking about verbosity. don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating switching to APL just so your source files will be smaller

APL has a reputation for being hard to read, but C is also hard to read and uses a lot of symbols which make source files smaller without making code simpler.

I just think that things you write all the time (block delimitation) should be quick to write.

The C-style for loop is not quick to write. You have to repeat the variable name three times like for(i = 1; i <= 10; ++i), and it's a lot harder to read than for i = 1 to 10 or Lua for i=1,10 do. switch is also verbose and error-prone because you have to write case and break all the time. These case and break take up more characters than the Pascal case statement[1], so C is the verbose language there too. C strings and arrays are lower level so you end up using more code for them and the compiler can't optimize them as well.

this is why I really dislike Java (at least pre-Java 8, modern Java is tolerable in comparison): there's just too much boring boilerplate.

Java is a curly brace language, so begin and end are not your problem at all. Java's verbosity and boilerplate don't come from the length of the tokens it uses, except for the parts copied from C like switch. Eiffel programs are shorter and considered easier to read than Java programs and it uses begin/end. Ruby also uses begin/end and people preferred it before the JavaScript takeover.

[1] https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refsu56.html