> Never going to happen IMO. Adding static types would change the nature of the language completely, even more than it has in Python.

You both are kind of right.

The Lua authors have been working on the new companion language to Lua named Pallene. Pallene is a subset of Lua that adds types, not for the sake of types themselves, but for the purpose of performance. The Pallene compiler can generate optimized native code that potentially removes the need to manually write a module for Lua in C.

The other cool trick is that Pallene and Lua are completely interoperable with each other, so Pallene can be added to existing Lua projects, and you can opt to use regular Lua for the dynamic parts of your code where compilers won't be able to optimize much and strong types might be more trouble than help.

Here is a talk Roberto Ierusalimschy gave about Pallene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGF2UFG7n6Y

Is that true ... you can't have typed tables without giving up tables as a data structure?