I gave Lua a shot, several years ago. Was disappointed, quite a lot. Did not feel right to me at all. In fact, I soon found myself fighting it on many occasions.
At that point in time, read() was *silently* failing for binary data. Took me quite some time to figure out that this is causing the unexpected behavior I observed. During the process, I read some reference and found nothing. Only some googling after I knew what was going on got me to a page that, among other things, addressed this issue with a laconic "binary read() is expected to work in Lua 5".
That was enough to push me over the edge, I left Lua and never looked back, and I'm perfectly happy with that decision.
Which only goes to show that there is no silver bullet, no "universally great first programming language", I guess.