Lua only departs from norms if you’ve had a very narrow experience with other programming languages.

Frankly, I welcome the fact that Redis doesn’t use JavaScript. It’s an abomination of a language. The fewer times I need to use it the better.

I think criticizing JavaScript has become a way of signaling "I'm a good programmer." Yes, good programmers ten years ago had valid reasons to criticize it. But today, attacking the efforts of skilled engineers who have improved the language (given the constraints and without breaking half of the web) seems unfair. They’ve achieved a Herculean task compared to the Python dev team, which has broken backward compatibility so many times yet failed to create a consistent language, lacking a single right way to do many things.