They both have the same root business case: make Scheme palatable to mere mortals, by adding a familiar syntax and abandonning some features: no more macros, an

They both have the same root business case: make Scheme palatable to mere mortals, by adding a familiar syntax and abandonning some features: no more macros, and most data structures made mutable. Where Lua diverges from Javascript: * time has been taken to design it properly; * backward compatibility has been broken more than once, to allow cleaning up design mistakes. Also, it's not accurate to describe Lua as "designed by academinc": early developments have been driven by Petrobras' needs, more recent ones by the gaming industry and some prominent users such as Adobe's Photoshop Ligthroom. If you look at Lightroom team's rants about Lua 5.0 (http://www.lua.org/wshop05/Hamburg.pdf http://www.lua.org/wshop05/Hamburg.pdf), then at the Lua 5.0 -> Lua 5.1 diff, you'll see that the latter is closely inspired by the former.