Weird? :) Surely all languages have their idiosyncrasies otherwise there'd be so very few to choose from? I mean, 1-based arrays can be found in several popular languages like R, Julia, & MATLAB. Taking the opposite perspective: there's so much in Lua that is familiar. I'd argue that coders who have never used it before could easily make sense of a Lua program. (I'll give you metatables, though — they're a bit unusual!)