Just wanted to point out a couple of things: > unusual prototypical inheritance It was the language Self (as far as I know) that introduced prototype based pr

Just wanted to point out a couple of things: > unusual prototypical inheritance It was the language Self (as far as I know) that introduced prototype based programming. The initial definition of Self happened in the mid-80s if I remember right and there were a ton of papers formalizing various aspects of the language including theories for prototype inheritance. Bib for Self: http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/index.html http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/index.html > notation Must say that I don't consider notation as theoretically interesting. It is practically interesting obviously. (And things like anonymous functions have existed since Lisp) > single-threaded asynchronous execution There is an incredible amount of research in concurrency models. It is a little hard to point to a single source; but the theories of CSP and the actor model have been around for a long time and it has been incorporated in to various languages in more or less the Node JS style. Don't get me wrong. Javascript has many interesting things to it practically. But the theory has been around for a long time.