[pcthrowaway]

> the special things that make JavaScript distinctive (callbacks, artisanal object systems, the interplay of JS and the DOM)

If you're coming to Javascript from pretty much any other language, prototypal inheritance is probably going to be the biggest difference in paradigm to wrap your head around.

[twic]

The thing is, in the JavaScript i've seen, there is no direct use of prototypal inheritance. Instead, there's some mechanism, usually involving a method called "extend" which implements something that looks like classes and instances on top of prototypes. This is what i meant by "artisanal object systems".