Prototype based languages

steve dekorte - docs - protos:

"Prototype-based languages are object oriented langauges where a new object instance is 'cloned' from existing live object(a prototype) instead of being constructed by a class. This makes the language simpler by requiring one less data type and solving the infinte regress problem of classes(if you use a class to create an object, what do you use to create a class?). It is also ideal for systems such as GUIs where the pattern of creating one object by copying and modifying another is already handled by the language itself."

This post is a follow-up to my previous post on learning Io. What is interesting is that Javascript is supposed to be a prototype based language, and it is one of the only mainstream languages of this type. Amazing! I have used javascript before the days when each browser tried to define its own DOM and other browser-specific features. But I have never actually used any of its prototype features or heard of it. Sure I created a few functions here and there but nothing else. So either the prototype nature of Javascript is so transparent or I was just not taking enough notice of it. In case anyone is interested, I was using Jumping Javascript as my source of learning and reference. In spite of all the negative reviews on Amazon, I would say that this was the first book and Javascript was the first programming language that taught me what programming was all about. Weird but true!

JavaScript:

"In a nutshell, JavaScript is a dynamic scripting language supporting prototype based object construction"

One of the examples that I could find on the object-oriented nature of Javascript:

// create a base class with one method
function Base(b)
{
   this.b = b;
}
Base.prototype.foo = function()
{
   alert('foo');
}
...

After reading the article more, I think I might have actually seen this before. Either way, I might continue playing around with Javascript and its class creations or just default to learning Io. The interesting thing about Io is its OpenGL bindings. With those bindings, I can just recreate my OpenGL projects in Io to see the difference between object-oriented programming and prototype-based languages.