It's the perfect distraction: once you start accepting one-based, everything else that might be not quite to your liking isn't worth talking about. I could easily imagine an alternative timeline where lua was zero-based, but never reached critical mass.

Absolutely so. It’s just one obvious thing from a large set of issues with it.

One can read through “mystdlib” part of any meaningful Lua-based project to see it. Things you’ll likely find there are: NIL, poor man’s classes, __newindex proxying wrapper, strict(), empty dict literal for json, “fixed” iteration protocols.

You don’t even have to walk too far, it’s all right there in neovim: https://neovim.io/doc/user/lua.html

This is very valuable! Thank you!

Perhaps that's the secret to lua's success: they got the basics so wrong that they can't fall into the trap of chasing the dream of becoming a better language, focusing on becoming a better implementation instead. Or perhaps even more important: not changing at all when it's obviously good enough for the niche it dominates.

That's an interesting notion but I think that Lua had no competition - it was almost unique in how easy it was to integrate vs the power it gives. Its popularity was inevitable that way.

The language actually started as a data entry notation for scientists.