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).