Yes I love fennel for this. I've done a lot of professional lua work and I don't enjoy it as much as people here tend to.

Fennel is an astounding technical accomplishment, laser focused on the worst practical issues with lua and completely avoiding lisp nerd quagmires. It's extremely practical too: you can hook the compiler into the lua module loader and since it's just a syntax layer over lua semantics you can drop it into any lua project. Being able to freely share functions and tables between the two makes working on legacy lua code so more comfortable.

I've used it extensively and have almost nothing bad to say about it, extremely rare for me with any programming language.