Comment by msephton
I work in Lua every day as a game developer. A GOTY in 2023 being my highest achievement so far. By and large Lua just gets out of the way, which is the most important thing for me. I have some minor issues with it, nothing huge, and I work around them with some utility functions that I've created or collected over the years.
The most recent edition of this book is from 2016. Surely time for a new edition.
First off, congrats and feel free to share a link to your game here as I got interested.
I totally resonate with your comment about the language not getting in your way. I use all sorts of languages for different kinds of applications for many years and only recently I started creating games.
Whereas in other domains I appreciate complex languages that address necessarily complex tasks, in game development, while the game as a whole is a complex system, you often are handling simpler tasks and mostly thinking about algorithms. At least in my experience tackling these algorithms requires mostly mathematical calculations and for that, you definitely want the language to stay out of your way.
In game dev no matter if you pick an imperative or functional approach, you really need to use all your brain power on your problem domain. Language complexities are often distractions that aren't super useful, since like I already said, the task at hand is mainly algorithmic in nature.