If you are willing to fork Lua (and it's been done---one example is Ravi, which brings static typing) you can fix the verbose lambda syntax (http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2017-04/msg00387.html) and add ternary operators (which I haven't missed). I haven't found the mixing of arrays and dictionaries that bad in practice (and I do a lot of Lua programming at work) and the default scoping ... yeah, I can see that (I've learned to deal).

I had a fork a long time ago solely to allow the use of "?" in function-names. Writing:

    function alive?
       ... blah
    end

Is so much more natural, after being exposed to ruby. But maintaining forks is hard, so I've slowly gotten use to the standard.

It's a shame that the development is so conservative, and closed, but despite that it is a great language to play with.

    A function that tests for something involving its arguments
    is called a predicate and usually ends in p or -p.

http://www.cliki.net/Naming+conventions

>"incoherent mixing of arrays and dictionaries"

Incoherent? 10 years of Lua development, never had a problem with it. In fact, the ability to use a table as either an array or a dictionary is one of the great features of the language. Most newbie Lua coders get over the differences pretty fast. For everyone else, there is lua-enumerable.lua ...

https://github.com/mikelovesrobots/lua-enumerable

Well, 10 years isn't the problem, it's picking it up in the first place. For example, the whole pairs/ipairs thing falls out of that original weird decision.

I love Lua. It's embeddable, it's written with newbie-friendliness in mind... but I still think it has flaws that I wish we'd see fixed. To me, the biggest one missing is just some simple convenience stuff for higher-order-functions - like I said before, the lack of a ternary "inline if" which is super-handy for writing one-line lambdas, and the verbosity of its lambda syntax.

I dunno, I think that the distinction between pairs/ipairs is quite handy - there are times when you want to use an array, a list, a dictionary, a sparse array, a sorted array, and so on. Lua's tables are so flexible that it can be used in all of these cases quite handily - of course, the programmer has to pay attention to how he's using those tables, though. I think thats kind of a strength, but ymmmv ..