[raganwald]

Object.create(...) is a factory pattern. "Object" is suddenly a factory for making anything, you just supply the blueprint in the form of "Point." So to know what will happen, I need to look at Object and at Point. One strength of this pattern is when I want to handle cross-cutting concerns in the factory. For example, I can modify all objects created with aspects if I use a factory to create them. Or I could have the factory decide whether it is creating Plain Old Javascript Objects or whether each object is backed by persistent storage a'la ActiveRecord.

A factory is very different from a keyword baked into the language. The new keyword suggests that the underlying language is doing the construction, and all of the details about the object being created are encoded in its blueprint, "Point."

I consider a factory and a keyword to be two very different patterns regardless of whether you want to call them class-based or prototype-based.