I think it once was taught, but was considered passé in various places during the "Java" revolution, and in general I think there is a degradation of capabilities in most comp-sci programs, a consequence of interference by market players who invest in the schools in order to keep their technologies relevant.
If anyone reading this wants to see what the fuss is, you can get started very easily with antirez' (Redis fame) simple toy project, LOAD81 - which is a great example of just how powerful things can get when you bring Lua into your life. (http://github.com/antirez/load81.git) - note that this is a great project to learn this technique, but if you do anything interesting in the load81 context - please push it back to LOAD81. :)
