[mmjaa]

Sorry, but as a long-time Lua user, I have not found any of your points to be true at all. Lua is truly editor friendly; I can even use cscope with it. Meta-programming is light, that is why it is meta-. Idempotency is one thing: shipping code is something else, and a well managed Lua project ships.

Composition: see meta-tables. Repeat until completion.

[optionalparens]

Again, you're welcome to disagree. We're talking about game development in particular, not Lua in general. I've used Lua and almost always look to it for scripting in game engines I have built.

It's telling that all the major game engines and a large portion of papers and talks disagree with you. If Lua was the solution to data-driven development, people wouldn't bend over backwards looking for solutions like entity component systems. Lua is nice, but not suitable for most professional game development as a primary language. As such, it makes it completely unsuitable because Lua data, especially things that depend on runtime state are utterly useless.

Your shipping comment also makes no sense in this context. Tons of other languages have more games shipped than Lua. There aren't too many people relying on Lua for composition and data-driven development in games, because it doesn't work. Even Lisp doesn't work in this context putting speed and other things aside, because of so many reasons I've already listed. Code in the context of game development is not data by the definition of data I am referencing.