I absolutely agree but just responding to one point - i've played with Lua Wax and the lack of debugging and the fact that any Lua script error causes a segfaul

I absolutely agree but just responding to one point - i've played with Lua Wax and the lack of debugging and the fact that any Lua script error causes a segfault makes coding with Lua not worth the pain of losing the XCode editor and debugger and statement completion, etc. If you're putting in a scripting engine for a game that's one thing. If you want an easier way to write cellForRowAtIndexPath, I don't recommend it...