Age isn't necessarily the issue imo. Lua is older than Ruby and has managed to show restraint against implementing every new popular language feature that has s

Age isn't necessarily the issue imo. Lua is older than Ruby and has managed to show restraint against implementing every new popular language feature that has shown up in the interim time. And when Lua does add a feature it's usually done in a way that is congruent with the existing idioms. I'd say Ruby, JavaScript and PHP tend to bolt-on features that are popular without much thought of original design goals or existing idioms.