He doesn't appear to be advocating using this as a practical coding style. It is simply a way of showing people whats really going on with new and the prototyp

He doesn't appear to be advocating using this as a practical coding style. It is simply a way of showing people whats really going on with new and the prototype chain by writing it out in javascript. When I was learning js (ie getting over the jquery hump) I could have used this because the new operator is so damn unintuitive. This is a good article for learning how prototypes really work in js.