Ruby, Python, and Lua were all created in the early nineties, when the alternatives were Tcl and Perl. And it still required each of them a decade or more to ta

Ruby, Python, and Lua were all created in the early nineties, when the alternatives were Tcl and Perl. And it still required each of them a decade or more to take off. This was also at a time when most programming languages did not have free implementations and companies actually sold compilers and interpreters. The programming language landscape was totally different back then.