For people who aren't familiar with Self (which is a pity), you can think of it as "if JavaScript supported multiple prototypes": fields whose name end in * all

For people who aren't familiar with Self (which is a pity), you can think of it as "if JavaScript supported multiple prototypes": fields whose name end in * all act like __proto__ (trying one after another) and the "lobby" is equivalent to the global this object (known to browser users as "window"). Many of the other semantics are the same, though the syntax is very very different... FWIW, Smalltalk's syntax maintained a lot of similarity to Self, and both share the penchant for replacing control structure with dispatch, including for basic things like loops and if statements; for people who haven't studied Smalltalk at all (another pity), Ruby is "quite different" and yet "remarkably similar", and so is worth having in an adjacent mental space.