They allow you to bind with your game and quickly work on ideas without the recompile-link step as you would with something like C++ in the mix.
However in a highly parrallel world those languages start to look lacking as they often have a 'global' state which makes it hard to write code which can execute across multiple threads in the langauge in question (I'm aware of stackless python, and I admit I've not closely looked at it), certainly when data is being updated.
This got me thinking, going forward a likely common pattern in games to avoid locks is to have a 'private' and 'public' state of objects which allows loops which look like this;
[update] -> [sync] -> [render]
or even
[update] -> [render] -> [sync]
Either way that 'sync' step can be used, in a parallel manner, to move 'private' state to be publical visable so that during the 'update' phase other objects can query and work with it.
Of course to do this effectively you'd have to store two variables, one for private and one for public state, and deal with moving it around which is something you don't really want to be doing.
This got me thinking, about about if you could 'tag' elements as 'syncable' in some way and have the scripting back end take care of the business of state copying and, more importantly, context when those variables were active. Then, when you ran your code the runtime would figure out, based on context, which copy of the state it had to access for data.
There would still need to be a 'sync' step called in order to have the run time copy the private data to the public side, which would have to be user callable as it would be hard for the runtime to know when it was 'safe' to do so but it would remove alot of the problem as you would only declare your variables once and your functions once and the back end would figure it out. (You could even use a system like Lua's table keys where you can make them 'weak' by setting a meta value on them so values could be added to structures at runtime). The sync step could also use a copy-on-write setup so that if you don't change a value then it doesn't try to sync it.
It needs some work, as ideas go, to make it viable but I thought I'd throw the rough idea out for some feedback, see if anyone has any thoughts on it all.
