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I'm using Lua whenever possible for side projects. It's familiar enough syntax-wise that it's easy to transition to it and get something done but weird enough that I don't feel like I'm still at work. I even kind of like the infamous array indexing and nonsensical length function because they don't behave quite like I'm used to.


I've been falling in love with Lua recently, and it'd be my choice. The few big standouts for me are:

* LuaJIT. Amazing performance, ranging from near-C to better-than-C.

* 1-indexing actually prevents a lot of off-by-one errors.

* Anything can return. Even files. (Great for library making, and generating namespaces.)

* Luarocks is a decent package manager, for a very basic language.

* Moonscript. No-boilerpate to-Lua language, but Lua can import it, and vice-versa.


Lua is a lot of fun to write with, especially when interfacing with C/C++. The email-client I wrote uses Lua extremely heavily for its implementation.


If you just want “weird,” then why not use brainfuck [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck




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