Just would like to know why you chose exactly Lua for Codea to be? There are many other languages… Why Lua? Yes, I see, Lua is a beautiful language and I love writing on it. But when Simeon worked on Codea in alpha, he chose it for a reason I’d like to know 
I think it’s because Lua is easy-to-learn (I would also say a little bit intuitive) and the portability of Lua in game engines (such as Codea) is simplier than other languages, because when you try to create a game engine that runs on a system that doesn’t have much RAM as computers do it’s trickier to choose a programming language that is easy-to-learn, has to be fast when it reads the code (I think there’s no app that compiles directly into the iPad’s hard disk) and maintains a readable and simple (but powerful) API between C/C++ and the embedded programming language.
I would say that Codea was thinking about the idea that the App would give not only to adults but also to everyone (even kids) the possibility of learning how to program and make games, including those who don’t know it (yet) but want to learn how to create (and make) games in their tablets; or they just want to make it simplier running a program that says “Hello World”. I think that’s why Codea developers chose Lua as the main programming language.
Nevertheless, like other languages, Lua has limitations and it’s easier for you changing to another language if you want to make really big and complex projects on your PC (as explained in http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaVersusPython).
I hope this answered your question…hehe 