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.
I would use Common Lisp, which supports rapid development (you have a running image and can compile/recompile individual functions) and tailoring the language to your domain.  You would provide functions and macros as building blocks to express strategies, and the whole language would be available to the user for combining these.
Scripting language for trading strategy development