Improving EcmaScript5 OO with sugar

[raganwald]

“There are multiple similar prototypical OO utilies... All solve the same problem:”

http://xkcd.com/927/

[Raynos]

For the record, I didn't write this library because I thought I could do it better.

I wrote it because I didn't know about these other utilities / tools.

[mrspeaker]

I hope ES.next gets a bunch of the goodness that is outlined in Harmony - this would mostly eradicate the need for stop-gap libraries like pd, or transpilers like CoffeeScript. http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:object_litera...

And being able to do

    var obj = protoObj <| { ... properties ... }

would be fantastic. If I that, and short function syntax then I'd be happy.

[Raynos]

You need all three I'm afraid.

We need an easy way to mixin/extend objects.

   var obj = protoObj <| mixin({ ... properties ... }, mixinA);

We also need a solid way to create instances.

   object.create(obj);
   obj.constructor();

is just too verbose. There is some talk around making `new` work with object exemplars which would be great.

[Autre]

Maybe I overlooked, but is there support for "super.method()" or something along those lines?

[Raynos]

super is a nightmare to emulate and get "right". It has a bunch of weird edge cases you don't really want to think about.

I promote code like

    var Cat = Object.make(Animal, {
      constructor: function() {
        Animal.constructor.apply(this, arguments);
        ...
      },
      walk: function() {
        Animal.walk.apply(this, arguments);
        ...
      }
    });

Now compare:

- Animal.walk.apply(this, arguments);

- this.super.apply(this, arguments);

- this.super.walk.apply(this, arguments);

Using super doesn't fix verbosity, it only fixes hard coupling of Child class name to Super class name.

For the complexities, edge cases and performance penalties a super implementation gives, it's simply not worth fixing this hard coupling.

If you know of a super implementation that _just works_ please [Leave an answer on StackOverflow](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8032566/emulate-super-in-...)