It's worth mentioning the debt Lua owes to Self and Newtonscript. An extraordinary amount of Lua's syntax and semantics is directly lifted from these languages

It's worth mentioning the debt Lua owes to Self and Newtonscript. An extraordinary amount of Lua's syntax and semantics is directly lifted from these languages. Newtonscript in particular seems to be a template for a great many of Lua's interesting features. What drove me away from Lua is its philosophy of providing minimal tools in which it is possible, but never easy or convenient, to do work in various programming modalities. Polymorphism, namespaces and packages, arrays, unicode... these things all can be done, but require significant head-standing and in many cases a lot of boilerplate. Even proto-style OO, which you would imagine would be Lua's signature feature, involves lots of rigamarole compared to languages (like Newtonscript) where it is baked in and elegant. I kept wanting Lua to pick a pony. Throughout my usage of Lua, I've consistently gone back to Lisp, where I could change the language to make inconvenient things convenient when I needed to.