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.
This might be a bit simplistic, but a lot of quant users are used to working with Excel & VBA macros.  Would something like VBSCript be usable, as they may have some experience in this area.
Scripting language for trading strategy development