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I think JavaScript might be most successful on Arduino for the same reason - it's a platform with which most tinkerers are familiar.

http://blog.safaribooksonline.com/2013/07/16/javascript-powe...

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I suspect Arduino (at least the ones I've used, Uno?) are a bit underpowered for higher level managed languages like JavaScript.

Absolutely. On AVRs, `new` and `malloc` work, but just barely. RAII/stack-only programming is basically a necessity. That is simply not possible with languages like Python or Javascript.

JS doesn't necessarily have to run natively for this kind of programming model to work out. Johnny5, the library discussed in the link I provided, rather provides an interface to the Arduino's StandardFirmata API http://firmata.org/wiki/Main_Pager

To be fair, the Espruino JavaScript interpreter manages this pretty well (in around 8kB of RAM). http://www.espruino.com

Anyone with a tinkerer's mind would not have a moment's trouble picking up Lua particularly if they already knew Javascript (or any other scripting language for that matter).

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