[fleitz]

That prototypes are overly complex.

You can't simulate most imperative programs with functional ones because writing in a functional language eliminates a vast majority of bugs due to incomplete reasoning about memory barriers and other really hard to duplicate issues like race conditions.

CHESS is an amazing piece of software precisely because it CAN simulate race conditions and reproduce them, however, if these things didn't exist no one would ever bother trying to reproduce them.

I'm quite fine not being able simulate these issues.

[j_baker]

I'm not saying you're wrong, but isn't this a bit like saying that files are overly complex because they can be used to simulate sockets?

[fleitz]

It is, but on the other hand if you write code to work with sockets then you get a performance boost on spinning disks because your IO is sequential. And many other benefits like trivial cache prediction, buffering, etc.

I do think that prototypes have useful properties, but I'm not sure that a prototype isn't a form of an open class. I tend to think that the biggest problem with prototypes in js is the interface.

[ZenPsycho]

Prototypes in JS are problematic due to false cognates- it tried to look like Java (due to marketing department fuckery), and use the same keywords as java, but it doesn't act at all like Java which leads to some nasty surprises. This has been fixed in ES5- the correct way to inherit from a prototype is no longer via constructor functions and their prototype property, but via Object.create()