[etiene]

This is true, but the reason is just people already knowing python / python being more popular. Lua is a much simpler language than python or julia though, I'd absolutely still recommend it for data scientists who are new to programming.

[agibsonccc]

Right but with a good enough FFI and wanting to actually deploy models in some way, having the infrastructure to deploy general purpose applications in the same language (even if it's slower than say: go or the JVM) is really appealing. Lua itself while simpler owns a very different part of the application space than python does. There's a reason more peopple know it.

I would actually recommend against lua because of the lack of libraries for doing every day data science tasks.

I mean look at what facebook had to do to justify using lua, it had to invent the notebook for it.