I would say it's absolutely a valid comparison, although Lua doesn't encourage the object-messages style of programming, it cooperates excellently with it. My

I would say it's absolutely a valid comparison, although Lua doesn't encourage the object-messages style of programming, it cooperates excellently with it. My first hire for a project written in Lua had Smalltalk experience, and the way we extend Lua's metaobject protocol is heavily inspired by that and Ruby. But anything in Lua is ultimately built around tables, coroutines, and plain-old-closures; Lua chunks are in fact anonymous functions but they are very fast and easy to compile since chunks can't be moved. It does mean tolerating statement-orientation and built-in control flow; I can live with that.