Man it’s kinda sad as a Lua fan to see so much interest in a project where the main goal is just to not use Lua. I guess academics like familiarity and Lua insistently refuses to be like other languages (arrays and maps in one type, 1-based arrays, nonstandard builtin patterns, etc).
Academics simply don't have the time to learn languages that do not have substantial ecosystems and relative ease-of-use.
It’s true - there have been attempts to fix it, but nobody has created something other people want to use. The Torch project largely replaced all of the then-popular Lua packages — wxLua was dropped for Torch’s internal qtLua, the Lua concurrency libraries (Lanes and luaproc) were ignored in favor of zeroMQ, LPeg and Lua patterns were generally less popular than PCRE and Re2 bindings, et cetera. Maybe Torch is to blame (NIH syndrome), maybe the Lua packages weren’t up to the task, maybe communication within the community is too hard (Lua lacks centralized discussion channels where experienced users are regularly active), but in the end, Lua didn’t come away looking good here.
Learning a new language wasn’t too hard when that language was Python, after all.