My understanding is that there was a language fork after 5.1. One thing was a complete reworking of how math works. It used to be just floating point for everything but the new idea was to make it like Python 3. So most operations are float/integer with some weird exceptions.
As with any language fork there will be some who stay and others who switch to the new thing. Often a fork will drive people away from a particular language as in my case.
the beauty of open source is there's nothing stopping you! this might be your calling. best of luck
There’s no “basically”. Stick a fork in it; it’s done: https://www.python.org/doc/sunset-python-2/
It might not be supported by the consortium, but python2 still lives, slowly, in one place or another:
> The RHEL 8 AppStream Lifecycle Page puts the end date of RHEL 8's Python 2.7 package at June 2024.
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/4455511
At this point in RHEL it is only "deprecated", not "obsolete".
Lua's nature as a primarily embedded language means backwards compatibility is not guaranteed between any version. If 5.2 was a language fork then so was 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, etc. (5.2 did have some more significant changes though)
For that reason luajit staying at ~5.1 actually works in its favor. Rather than trying to follow the moving target of the newest version, it gives a robust focal point for the lua ecosystem, while modern versions can be developed and continue to serve their purpose in embedded systems and whatnot where appropriate.