> i dont use or like lua, but I'm a big fan of one of his other projects, janet

As a big fan of both Lua _and_ Janet, I'll just point out that a lot of what makes Janet nice and interesting are in fact inspired by Lua. Tables, fibers (coroutines), prototypes (metatables/metamethods), custom module loaders, a lot of the API, the peg parser (LPEG), etc etc. I understand no language is for everyone, but the influence can be felt throughout Janet if you're familiar with both.

I’ll also add that Fennel fixes some of things about Lua most people dislike, like the global variables by default thing. IMO it’s worth checking out even if you didn’t like Lua at first

I didn't realize the author of Janet was the author of Fennel, thanks for making the connection.

Yup, same author! Although to my knowledge Calvin has mostly stepped away from the Fennel project at this point. It is primarily maintained by the same dev that made Clojure's Leiningen, technomancy.

I got nothing but respect for technomancy.

I love that it comes with build instructions for Haiku—and that they're listed before Windows!