To extend and elaborate on the analogy further : Plato's forms is class-based OOP, the bluebrint is categorically different than the objects it generates, it is

To extend and elaborate on the analogy further : Plato's forms is class-based OOP, the bluebrint is categorically different than the objects it generates, it is the sole source of the objects it generates, and it always comes before the objects it generates. It's also a complete description of every single object it generates: there is not a single thing you can do to the generated objects that is not precisely described and predicted by the blueprint*. There's another way : Nominalism, abstract blueprints and concepts don't exist, they are just artificial markers we put on sets of concrete objects to express some degree of similarity. That is, There's no such thing as a 'Tree' in the abstract, there's only the green thing with roots and branches under your house and the green thing with roots and branches under mine, we gave them (and countless other green things with roots and branches) the same name merely to express that we view them as equal under some circumstances, but that name doesn't express anything about the concrete objects themselves, just our brains, each object is completely unique and incomparable to any other in any objective way. Nominalism is similar to prototypical OOP, there is no such thing as a blueprint, concrete objects spring fully-formed into existence directly from the mind of their creator, or they are cloned from other concrete objects. If blueprints exist at all, they are only external descriptions by us observers to denote similarities: that object has x: and y: attributes and that object also has x: and y: attributes (possibly because it's a clone of the first) so they are the same 'type', but those objects don't 'know' they are the same type (well, they do if they're clones, as they point to the same parent, but whatever), and the universe allows any object to grow and shrink and morph independently of any other, similarities are imposed/discovered solely by observation from the outside. *:This principle might be violated in dynamic object systems with sophisticated meta-object protocols, as the blueprint itself is just an object that you can manipulate and mutate at runtime with various things not in the static description.