sient wrote:
If you really like Lua, make sure to look into Lisp (
Clojure is the "trendy" dialect as of now).
Thumbs Down for Clojure
I would rather suggest starting with Common Lisp or Scheme first, if you don't have to use the Java VM.
A nice book for learning Lisp or even programming in general is
Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation.
If you want to become excited about lisp just read some
Paul Graham
As for Lua:
It is a very nice and clean and powerful language, definitely worth learning.
Even though "Tables" are obviously a wonderful feature there are like no other language offering anything comparable to lua tables.
(And yeah Python might come with more libs but as a language it is clearly inferior in my onion, especially when compared to
metalua.
Though all in all Python is no so bad for a first language and has some interesting ideas,)
As for Lua and OOP:
You really should not brother learning about OO as long as you are not able to write an OO-system for lua yourself.
In fact you CAN write non-trivial games in lua without having ever having read anything about OO and it doesn't have to become a mess at all
Just cause OO might be a good idea for huge application doesn't mean it is the only way to do stuff.
Also people should keep in mind that OO can also have disadvantages like increase of code size, making stuff more bloated.
Of course OO is still a wonderful concept, if someone really is interested in it, I recommend watching this talk:
Alan Kay: The Computer Revolution hasn't happend yet.
I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind
If you really want to try some language that is based on the idea of OO you should try
squeak
It is one of the best development environments available today,