Not surprisingly, domain-specific languages (e.g. sed, awk, MATLAB) tended to be pleasant within their intended domain, and miserable outside of it.

A notable exception was vimscript.

It felt miserable to program in vimscript even when I was using it to write programs intended to manipulate text interactively.

I dislike vimscript even when I’m scripting vim itself. It’s just awful. Built-in Lua support is not the only reason to like neovim, but it’s a huge plus.