I had two encounters with Lua many years ago.

The first to write "stored procedures" in Redis (I forget the correct terminology). It allowed to improve the performance of Django endpoints by an order of magnitude.

In the second, I wrote a Wireshark plugin (also not sure of the proper term) to dissect a proprietary protocol.

I don't remember the details but this is not a programming experience I look forward to renew... (Same feeling about Perl btw)

Possibly indices starting at 1 were the most disturbing.