I like Lua, but it does lack Ruby's elegance and expressiveness. Its best trait may be that it's simple, and therefore performant. On my list of gripes: Lua's

I like Lua, but it does lack Ruby's elegance and expressiveness. Its best trait may be that it's simple, and therefore performant. On my list of gripes: Lua's attempt at OO, being implemented as hash tables, is even more pitiful than JavaScript's. Also, arrays are implemented as hashes (just like PHP!), which is just one notch below JavaScript again. I also wish for a more expressive regex syntax, but then that's the text processing talking.