[mikojan]

The Java crowd indeed gave us god awful classes.

But before that there were countless competing models for creating objects or object factories.

Obviously, JavaScript is an object oriented language, too. You cannot escape that fact if you are determined to make the browser paint anything.

Classes effectively solved the "How?"

To pretend you don't need object orientation in JavaScript is really trying hard to make JavaScript into an entirely different language.

[austincheney]

> But before that there were countless competing models for creating objects or object factories.

Java and C# had object factories even though in those languages classes could not be avoided. People wanted classes because they could not figure how to program without them.

> To pretend…

Don’t use this or new in your code and suddenly a tremendous amount of your code is exposed as unnecessary superfluous vanity. That isn’t making the language into something else.

[mikojan]

> Java and C# had object factories

Object factories were competing models (plural) for creating any object. A total replacement for classes and the like, not an augmentation.

Here's one such model:

  function createCar(spec) {
    const {speed} = spec;
  
    let position = 0;
  
    return Object.freeze({
      move() {
       position += speed;
      },
      get position() {
        return position;
      }
    });
  }

And so you'd find this or any other model or multiple competing models in the very same code base.

It sucked.

> Don’t use this or new in your code

You are going to be mutating the internal state of objects. Using this and new or not.