Re: scope, I think the author was mainly complaining that Javascript's scoping rules tend to err on the side of global visibility, rather than following the typ

Re: scope, I think the author was mainly complaining that Javascript's scoping rules tend to err on the side of global visibility, rather than following the typical approach of scoping variables as narrowly as possible. Certainly it has scoping rules, it's just that they're unusually global for a language with Algol style syntax, and that makes it a common gotcha for people coming to JS from other places. What's wrong with the prototype? Nothing too bad, I suppose. Making things private is a little bit cleaner when you use the anonymous function/module method. By default, none of the methods are visible unless you explicitly expose them, whereas with a normal Javascript object you end up jumping through hoops to make private class methods actually be private - those hoops pretty much match what you do with the module pattern anyways, so... More importantly, the "needlessly complex and confusing" way of exposing functions (I don't necessarily disagree that it departs from "write what you mean", but I don't know that it's either too complex or confusing, it's a pretty simple pattern and often results in shorter code than prototyping would, esp. with private functions and data) is used just about everywhere when you work with other people's Javascript libraries. So it's a good thing to be familiar with it, as you're going to be looking at it almost every time you open up the source for any modern JS library.