[vardump]

Perhaps people's tastes vary? I find Lua an easy to use language. Easy to embed into C/C++ projects for scripting purposes. Also great when you can only spare 100 kB or so for an interpreter. (Arguably that was more important in the past.)

[fullstop]

For me it is a much easier language than, say, Erlang.

[SoftTalker]

Again, tastes. I found Erlang to be one of the easiest languages I ever used. I just immediately "got" it. Unfortunately I've had very few professional opportunities to use it.

[dev_l1x_be]

Erlang has multiple higher level barrier of entries than other languages. For starting, its syntax.

[behnamoh]

but Erlang isn't a scripting language, it's a full-blown language with a rich ecosystem and framework (BEAM).

[fullstop]

Lua is also a full blown language, with an ecosystem as well.

Perhaps the road block that you've run into is because you've been treating it as just a scripting language.