I really don't see the 'beautiful language' part. I tried LUA for the first time making a custom game mode for DOTA2 a while back (so admittedly not a huge amount of experience), and the language just seemed terrible to work with. Its focus on keeping the language simple meant that the standard library and language features are so bare-bones doing the most basic things was a huge chore.
...compare that to Perl where there is no "complete syntax" of Perl. This shows how simple it is and thus it is easier to write tools for and teach others how to use it.
[b] The complete default API consists of ~200 functions:
Simplicity is beauty IMHO. I would expect any competent developer to get up to speed on the Lua language within a week, it would then take them another couple of weeks to get up to speed on the libraries we use with Lua.
The real power in Lua comes when you couple it with competent APIs that do the "real" work. The Distelli Agent uses libuv for the OS interface, libcrypto (part of openssl) for the crypto primitives, zlib for compression, LPeg for parsing, sqlite for an embedded DB, etc.
The job of the Lua code is simply to "tie" these core components together.
I'm wondering what were the bigger pain points for you. I suspect that the bigger problem in your case is that you used Lua in an embedded setting with few libraries available (which is kinda intentional from the Dota devs)
