prototype modeling as an alternative to OOP

[genericdave]

Alright, I'm starting to get it now. This definitely one of the things that makes lua so awesome: its incredible flexibility. Lua is by no means perfect (it could use a bit more consistency), but rather than define what your best practices should be, it gives you a few basic tools that can do nearly anything and then gets out of your way. For example, I liked some aspects of Clojure, but the overall paradigm felt restrictive to me so I took some of the things I liked about Clojure (namely, the functions that deal with lists like map and reduce) and implemented them in Lua. Lua won't stop me if I decide that I wanna be more object oriented or if I decide that I don't need to bother with classes. It doesn't complain if my functions are "tainted" with side effects or if my indentation is wrong or what have you. It's a very liberating feeling.