Most of what Lua offers will not be a requirement for what the ad ops team needs to create and maintain campaigns and there will be specific requirements that are not easily expressed in Lua.

modulo binding to (extant) c++ runtime, yep.

But this was in spring of '95. Ruby released later in December of that year. Lua was first publicly released in '94. I learned about the existence of these two a few years later (Lua first, and then Ruby via RoR).

mea culpa: there was no reddit or github or HN back in '95. Usenet would have been helpful but it wasn't on my radar in those days. I was just 2 years out of architecture grad school, and not exposed to the CS communities in my student years.