> the things you're recommending a nine year old to do are
Are you the nine-year-old? I was responding to a criticism you made regarding your understanding. Are online tutorials for children learning their first programming language supposed to explain the rationale behind the language design? If you want the latter don't use children's tutorials, or in the case of Lua, any tutorials, because the official material is at least as easy to understand, and infinitely more reliable and accurate.
> This is important to understand if you want to have a good mental model of the language and why it's designed the way it is.
I want to have a good mental model of the code I write, and how that works, not the underlying language mechanisms themselves.
I've been picking up Kotlin, and I hardly know anything of how it works under the hood, other than whatever it 'inherits' from being a JVM language, and so far it's been totally fine. Why should I need to care about how the sausage is made?