[chriswarbo]

Since you've not defined it, I'll assume "proper OO" is referring to Alan Kay's formulation: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HeInventedTheTerm

In that case, his opinion on class vs. prototypes is that it misses the point: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-...

As an aside, prototypes are strictly more powerful than classes, so they're no "shanty": http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Lieberary/OOP/Delegation/De... (esp. section 6)