In this case I chose Lua not for its suitability to the problem but because the computer my child has is a NetBSD machine with few things besides Lua installed on it.

Cool, so the computer is fairly locked out of social media etc, which is neat

Not even connected to the internet! Whicih is why I picked a BSD -- fairly complete on its own. We'll see how long I can keep it up. I hope to make "connecting to the internet" a temporary thing done for a specific purpose and then one disconnects.