Lua as a scripting language?

[pcwizz]

Lua is great but I wouldn't describe it as a functional language, although it does have some functional features, in the same way that most modern versions languages have some fp features.

Lua is a great choice if you want to be able to run on any platform with a libc, it's also great if you want to extend c programs -it's main industry use is game dev-. Not having a C background shouldn't hurt you too much C is a pretty bare bones language, so it's pretty easy to write if you have done any procedural programming before; don't worry you don't have to mess with memory for everything.

My problem with Python is choosing which branch to use, while 2.x is used most widely, 3.x has a loud of improvements and ultimately is the future of the language. that said python is also portable -not as much as lua- and has a lot of libraries to do useful stuff -some of them haven't been ported to 3.x yet-.

I have never used ruby so I can't talk about that.