I'm currently working on a component of a trading product that will allow a quant or strategy developer to write their own custom strategies.  I obviously can't have them write these strategies in natively compiled languages (or even a language that compiles to a bytecode to run on a vm) since their dev/test cycles have to be on the order of minutes.
I've looked at lua, python, ruby so far and really enjoyed all of them so far, but still found them a little "low level" for my target users.  Would I need to somehow write my own parser + interpreter to support a language with a minimum of support for looping, simple arithmatic, logical expression evaluation, or is there another recommendation any of you may have?  Thanks in advance.
Existing languages are "a little "low level" for my target users."
Yet, all you need is "a minimum of support for looping, simple arithmatic, logical expression evaluation"
I don't get the problem.  You only want a few features.  What's wrong with the list of languages you provided?  They actually offer those features?
What's the disconnect?  Feel free to update your question to expand on what the problem is.
Scripting language for trading strategy development