The trouble goes deeper than that. Prototypal inheritance in itself probably wouldn't be all that confusing for these people — it's actually a simpler concept t

The trouble goes deeper than that. Prototypal inheritance in itself probably wouldn't be all that confusing for these people — it's actually a simpler concept than classical inheritance. The issue with JavaScript's object system is that it's downright convoluted. AFAIK, Self is the progenitor of prototype-based OO. In Self, the way you create a new object is just `someObject copy`. You can dynamically change its prototype later if you want, too. But in traditional JavaScript, you can't do that. You want an object? You need a constructor. Instead of just cloning a prototype, you have to do the whole `function Foo() { blah blah.prototype = someObject blah blah }; myFoo = new Foo()` rigamarole, and there is no standard way to access an object's prototype. JavaScript has finally got the equivalent of Self's object creation with Object.create, but that is pretty new — and the actual object system still has the whole wonky prototype/constructor/__proto__ mess behind the scenes.