Thanks for the replies, very informative.
For the background on the prototyping aspect of Lua, you can check this excellent blog post from Steve Yegge [1].
Regarding Python for data scientist, the type A is happy but not type B. The main reason the ill-fated Swift for TensorFlow project was proposed, is to better serve type B data scientists [2].
[1]http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/universal-design-pat...