OK true, technically speaking it is indeed more readable, I guess I really meant that it takes far longer to read. I do admire Lua's barebones simplicity. Thank you for the "or" tip, I've used it a few times before but I often forget about it.

The issue with Lua's and/or in this context is that they don't work if false or nil are valid values. In a and b or c, if b = false, the result is always c.

I also love null-related operators like ?? and ?. for this, since they explicitly check for null, letting you handle any non-null values for optional/default values. The syntax can get a bit cursed, like maybeNull?.maybeMethod?.(args) in JS, but I still prefer that to writing out multiple field accesses in an if condition... And arguably the code is only less readable if you aren't acclimated to it.

All that said I do really appreciate Lua's simplicity, as a language that provides tooling to create the features you want instead of building them into the language, though I wish it had some conventional regex instead of its own patterns.