Lots of workshops, factories, university research labs, etc. still use old machinery that would be a huge waste of money to replace just because the computer that controls it runs Windows 95. In some cases it can't be replaced because the company that created the software, drivers, or IO cards is long gone.
PUC Lua is supposedly a bit of a pain for ffi, but I havent tried it myself. Luajit is some kind of crazy magic. You can (almost) just copy and paste the c header file into the ffi.cdef function and then start using c functions as if they were lua functions.
Maybe you don't read much, but it's obvious they weren't making some universal statement about code. They are referring to the code you write when you are just experimenting by yourself, for yourself. The point is to not let irrelevant things like usefulness, quality, conventions, etc. limit just tinkering and learning.
I have IBS. Sometimes the consistency is like mud/tar. It's completely impossible to get clean without moisture. After a trip to Japan, I swore that if I ever manage to own my own home, I will install a Japanese toilet. I started to wonder how we in the west have accepted for so long that abrading skin with dry paper is cleaning.
PowerShell is sort of two languages, and it looks weird because they are often used together. But if you see them separate first, there isn't much there that is surprising. I do somewhat share your concern about it being built on dotnet, but one advantage is you have access to everything in dotnet, including building GUI apps (Windows only). Though, at that point the syntax does get kinda weird.
I still have a few of these games! It doesn't capture me quite like it did back then but the art style is still beautiful, and I remember it kicking off my understanding of "AI" as in game AI, not LLMs.
Understanding how wants and needs drove actions, and marvelling at the language learning game mechanic. The genetics gameplay as well. It was well ahead of its time. I was early teens when I first played it, the same year I started learning to make games in Dark Basic.
