Clarification of my mention of Alan Kay: he invented object oriented programming along with the rest of the Smalltalk group at Xerox PARC.
this in JavaScript behaves the way it does in any other prototype based language (as I mentioned before, see Self). Self and its lineage were part of an attempt to make an even purer object oriented language that Smalltalk. In Smalltalk you had objects...but you also had classes, which were somehow different. They were objects, but were part of a totally different inheritance hierarchy. Self asked if the classes were really necessary, or if they were baggage carried over from earlier programming experience. The answer at this point is quite clear. Classes are unnecessary, but it's really hard to get people past the baggage and comfortable with conjuring objects directly.
For completeness, there's a third branch of object oriented programming represented by Common Lisp's CLOS based on structs and generic functions with multiple dispatch. It turns out to be an even more powerful approach, and this isn't a thing in that system at all. That branch, if you take it seriously and work out the mathematics, leads to Stepanov's work on generic programming and the C++ Standard Template Library.
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Clarification of my mention of Alan Kay: he invented object oriented programming along with the rest of the Smalltalk group at Xerox PARC.
thisin JavaScript behaves the way it does in any other prototype based language (as I mentioned before, see Self). Self and its lineage were part of an attempt to make an even purer object oriented language that Smalltalk. In Smalltalk you had objects...but you also had classes, which were somehow different. They were objects, but were part of a totally different inheritance hierarchy. Self asked if the classes were really necessary, or if they were baggage carried over from earlier programming experience. The answer at this point is quite clear. Classes are unnecessary, but it's really hard to get people past the baggage and comfortable with conjuring objects directly.For completeness, there's a third branch of object oriented programming represented by Common Lisp's CLOS based on structs and generic functions with multiple dispatch. It turns out to be an even more powerful approach, and
thisisn't a thing in that system at all. That branch, if you take it seriously and work out the mathematics, leads to Stepanov's work on generic programming and the C++ Standard Template Library.