> "Provides convenience functions for working with prototype chains."
Yes, that's pretty much what an object system is, isn't it? It's some convenience behaviour, but it would be nice if the language had a built-in way of doing things that wasn't so inconvenient.
I wasn't disputing that, I'm saying it's irrelevant to the discussion (the commenter implied that prototype modification is related to how this is determined in a given function call).
I think it's pretty relevant. For example, something that is absolutely trivial in other languages (making super calls), is incredibly difficult to implement generically in JS, partially because of the way this behaves. This is something every class system (and of course just using prototype chains alone) in JS seems to run into. We ran into it early with Objective-J, and then CoffeeScript had the same problem: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014524
To clarify, you're saying super is difficult to implement in JavaScript? I think the power of JavaScript's design is borne out by how easily one can recreate classical inheritance in the language, a view shared by Crockford.
