Don't get me wrong, i've got my issues with lua, it's good at what it's designed to be, a small easily embeddable scripting language that plays nice with C, but i've definitely hit some limits with lua on larger stand alone projects that make it not so suitable.
Its tiny standard library, which kind of makes it limiting, I think is a boon for learning. It forces you to remake the wheel at times. Despite not being an OOP language, I learned about OOP by trying to write my own class system in lua using metatables, hitting the limits of what I could do, and looking into languages with built in classes that had all the 'things I was missing' in my own hackish OOP attempts in lua.
As far as learning goes, not having the tools baked in forces you to learn about how they actually work when you have to remake them. It might not be efficient for people who just want to get the job done, but for learning it's definitely helpful.
Lua's also used in a bunch of 'fun' things. It's used as a scripting language in tons of games, half the time when I look up lua stuff these days it's all about roblox...which I think is big with the kids or something...it's used in fantasy consoles like the pico8 and the tic80, it can be used to script whole games with things like LOVE and the solarus engine.
Personally, I found it to be a good language overall for inspiring self-motivated learning. There's always something fun that can be accomplished with lua relatively easily.
Its tiny standard library, which kind of makes it limiting, I think is a boon for learning. It forces you to remake the wheel at times. Despite not being an OOP language, I learned about OOP by trying to write my own class system in lua using metatables, hitting the limits of what I could do, and looking into languages with built in classes that had all the 'things I was missing' in my own hackish OOP attempts in lua.
As far as learning goes, not having the tools baked in forces you to learn about how they actually work when you have to remake them. It might not be efficient for people who just want to get the job done, but for learning it's definitely helpful.
Lua's also used in a bunch of 'fun' things. It's used as a scripting language in tons of games, half the time when I look up lua stuff these days it's all about roblox...which I think is big with the kids or something...it's used in fantasy consoles like the pico8 and the tic80, it can be used to script whole games with things like LOVE and the solarus engine.
Personally, I found it to be a good language overall for inspiring self-motivated learning. There's always something fun that can be accomplished with lua relatively easily.