Just to promote a heterodox(ford) opinion: while Torch is great, learning Theano might be a better use of a budding data scientist's time because python is used much more widely in the industry.
I think learning a new language like Lua along with Torch is probably useful if someone is doing cutting edge neural network research.
I think learning a new language like Lua along with Torch is probably useful if someone is doing cutting edge neural network research.