Lua is one of the most amazing bits of programming tech you can use... I have done all sorts of crazy things with it, from applications-with-databases to realtime scientific analysis, games engines and games ahoy, simple automation tooling for devops, and more. I recently decided to sit down and organize a few hundred directories, each with more than 20,000+ files in them, and I've now built a system that my colleagues are asking about installing for themselves..
Its just such a great tool, please don't deny yourself this wonderful experience. Get the VM, put it in something - or find a VM somewhere in something already, and have a lot of fun. And don't forget to make sure you know what a sparse array is, and why pairs() and why ipairs() .. you'll be glad you did!
PS - don't fall for the hype, you can do someTable[0] = "first", someTable[1] = "second" all you like .. :)
Learning Lua is a great way to get introduced to a lot of low-level concepts, from bytecode to VM's to language design and beyond.