Off-topic, but I had the opportunity to have several cuban PhDs teach some of the final classses in college (Multi-agent systems, computer intelligence, etc) ... All of them were incredibly good in their fields, better than any other professors I had in school, and as good as some of the brightest I've met in this field.
There were also some docs in other disciplines and they were all incredibly good. Based on that experience I think cuba is hardly "punching far above its weight", but reflecting great care, passion and responsibility as they do in other fields... We just assume a lot of things about cuba. I sure did before.
I don't think the "above its weight" in the title refers to the quality of Cuban education, but the size of its economy.
So, if you look at the number of qualified personnel committed to the epidemic by country, and divide over their per capita GNP, indeed Cuba is punching way above its weight.
Yes! The guy that made Max eventually made PureData (which is in the list). It's an awesome environment. Max (General) with MSP (Audio) and Jitter (Video) can do a lot of stuff, even control full lighting rigs + video, or even have a nice visual interface to an arduino. They recently integrated with Ableton Live too so you can use MSP patches as instruments. It's a great platform.
It's weird that I see many people complaining about tables because of pairs/ipairs or trivial stuff like that, which are more nuisances than anything. The flexibility of tables/metatables make them a very powerful data structure (not unlike javascript's prototype). I've been playing a bit with it for game development and you can build some very powerful stuff just using tables.
Maybe instead of trying to use lua as another language, you should totally embrace "the lua way" and then you'll understand why their tables/metatables is the way it is.
