Not knowing much about MoonScript and only knowing a tiny bit of Lua, does anyone have a recommendation on which is "better" if you are starting from where I'm at with these languages?
MoonScript looks class based; I avoid classes like the plague in JavaScript because of "this" but maybe that is the wrong starting assessment?
MoonScript supports classes via keyword, while in Lua you have to implement them yourself. That's about it. You can ignore them, even more so than in JS.
It's 10x larger than it needs to be, and seems to do a lot of unnecessary stuff. I would call this one hopelessly bloated and overengineered and recommend something like https://github.com/Yonaba/30log instead.
I would strongly recommend just learning vanilla lua. The beauty of lua is that it is lightweight and runs anywhere so it is worth learning on its own terms. Wrapper languages come and go, but lua 5.1 is still highly usable even though it hasn't changed its feature set in 15 years (and never will).
MoonScript looks class based; I avoid classes like the plague in JavaScript because of "this" but maybe that is the wrong starting assessment?