Let's put aside the god-awful 1-based tables, in 1993, which alone should have killed the language. My big problem with Lua is that it tries very hard to make

Let's put aside the god-awful 1-based tables, in 1993, which alone should have killed the language. My big problem with Lua is that it tries very hard to make possible all styles of language to all people, and as a result it is a language with a lot of boilerplate to do any one of them. For example, consider Lua's OO. The most obvious inspiration for Lua here was Newtonscript, via Self. They're quite open about it. Newtonscript and Self are prototype-style OO languages done well, as opposed to Javascript, which is a prototype-style OO abomination. Lua advertises itself as being able to do prototype-style OO, all you have to do is make some tweaks to its metatables. But while this stuff is baked into Newtonscript and Self, it is an amazing amount of boilerplate to do it in Lua, to the point of parody. https://www.lua.org/pil/16.1.html https://www.lua.org/pil/16.1.html