[wwweston]

It's especially weird that the author did this after:

(a) showing awareness that polluting the global namespace is bad

(b) demonstrating a technique for being able to use a constructor with apply (the "newless" constructor he shows earlier)

but I think a lot of the article is less "here's a set of good practices" and more "let's play with some of the less-familiar corners of JS and demonstrate how flexible it is."