Pico8 is hardly representative of what's great about Lua. Its a fantasy console, designed to be limited.
If you want to understand the Lua love, check out some of the other game frameworks like Cocos2D, MOAI, or Godot ..
I've used pretty much every language under the sun, but I keep coming back to Lua as my first choice for scripting because its so efficient, and easy to use. There really isn't much that can't be done with Lua and metatables. I prefer it over python because python dependencies are hell, whereas luarocks is a dream by comparison .. plus, libffi is just so darned useful ..
If you want to understand the Lua love, check out some of the other game frameworks like Cocos2D, MOAI, or Godot ..
I've used pretty much every language under the sun, but I keep coming back to Lua as my first choice for scripting because its so efficient, and easy to use. There really isn't much that can't be done with Lua and metatables. I prefer it over python because python dependencies are hell, whereas luarocks is a dream by comparison .. plus, libffi is just so darned useful ..