[stevekwan]

I really didn't want to write that. Ignorance is never really a good solution. :)

But from my experience, someone who is coming into JS for the first time is probably not setting up a complicated object hierarchy - they're probably just trying to figure out how to bind some events to a DOM element and get some basic UI functionality. And they probably don't need to use the this keyword as much as they think they have to.

I completely agree that this could be a bad decision on my part, or at least a very controversial one. But I'd rather have truly new JavaScript developers focus on things like encapsulation and closures before they get too far into the this keyword and constructor/prototype.