> vimscript plugins are better because they work with both vim and neovim
I think you mean "vimscript plugins are better for plugin adoption because they work with both vim and neovim".
From the language-design, performance, documentation, robustness/general codebase quality, and total number of users perspectives, Lua is overwhelmingly better than vimscript.
> I cannot fathom why people would want to do that considering that there is nothing that init.vim cannot already do
Ahh, yes, the Turing-equivalence fallacy: "technology A is theoretically capable of doing everything that B does, therefore they're equivalent". Brainfuck and Python are Turing-equivalent, and yet nobody would seriously argue that they're interchangeable.
Well, yes. Vimscript plugins will see better adoption. Lua matters for compute-heavy plugins.
> Ahh, yes, the Turing-equivalence fallacy: "technology A is theoretically capable of doing everything that B does, therefore they're equivalent".
Language design is not the full picture. init.lua is essentially a thinly-veiled init.vim with lua syntax. You will have to learn init.vim either way. It is extra work to do something in init.lua, and in using it you remove any chances of it ever working with an installation of vim (e.g. vim still has the best GUI options out there).
> From the language-design, performance, documentation, robustness/general codebase quality, and total number of users perspectives, Lua is overwhelmingly better than vimscript.
Even if ahead of Vimscript; from the language-design, performance, documentation and total number of users perspectives Lua sucks very very much.
I think you mean "vimscript plugins are better for plugin adoption because they work with both vim and neovim".
From the language-design, performance, documentation, robustness/general codebase quality, and total number of users perspectives, Lua is overwhelmingly better than vimscript.
> I cannot fathom why people would want to do that considering that there is nothing that init.vim cannot already do
Ahh, yes, the Turing-equivalence fallacy: "technology A is theoretically capable of doing everything that B does, therefore they're equivalent". Brainfuck and Python are Turing-equivalent, and yet nobody would seriously argue that they're interchangeable.
Design matters.