Lua

One the tracks on Exercism I found interesting is Lua. Lua and Tcl are kind of in the same arena: small languages often embedded in other applications.

Lua is far smaller than Tcl, with less builtin functionality, but it’s still quite capable (and extremely fast).

Object Oriented Lua

Lua OO is kind of tricky to wrap your head around. You’re either going to pick a closure-based approach (where the constructor function will return a table containing function elements and access the data from the constructor function’s scope), or you’re going to pick a metatable-based approach (which more closely resembles “traditional” OO class/instance style).

Since metatables are a new concept to a lot of Lua students, I wrote an article about it. Unfortunately, it’s kind of hidden on the Exercism website, so I’ll reproduce it here.

A brief OOP tutorial