I take it that there might not be any standard support for inheritance in ES.next beyond what is already there?
My personal favorite would be to get even more into Self-style (or Cecil-style) class-less inheritance, but I realize that that’s not for everyone.
Until consensus is reached, how about the following interim solution?
(1) I think what is most needed is standard support for subtyping. Node.js has util.inherits(subtype, supertype) (was: sys.inherits) that provides the bare minimum. [1] This could be added to ES.next without involving too much baggage.
(2) Defining constructor plus prototype in a single construct is also helpful. I really like how Resig’s Simple Inheritance looks (externally ;-), because it equates a type with the protoype (=a single object literal) and does not change much of JS’s core beyond that.
For the sake of good tool support, some guidance should be given with regard to inheritance. The current mess of competing approaches makes comprehensive JS tool support almost impossible. I don’t mean dictating something, but maybe giving best practices. I don’t think most frameworks need more than (2) (plus maybe some kind of transformation that tools would not need to know about for syntactic analysis).
As an aside: If only we could transport the elegance of object literals to inheritance, somehow. Object.create() feels like a good start. I’ve tried my hand at a purely prototypal API, but I find it difficult to make the syntax as beautiful as plain object literals.
www.2ality.com/2011/01/going-completely-prototypal-in.html
I take it that there might not be any standard support for inheritance in ES.next beyond what is already there?
My personal favorite would be to get even more into Self-style (or Cecil-style) class-less inheritance, but I realize that that’s not for everyone.
Until consensus is reached, how about the following interim solution?
(1) I think what is most needed is standard support for subtyping. Node.js has util.inherits(subtype, supertype) (was: sys.inherits) that provides the bare minimum. [1] This could be added to ES.next without involving too much baggage.
(2) Defining constructor plus prototype in a single construct is also helpful. I really like how Resig’s Simple Inheritance looks (externally ;-), because it equates a type with the protoype (=a single object literal) and does not change much of JS’s core beyond that.
For the sake of good tool support, some guidance should be given with regard to inheritance. The current mess of competing approaches makes comprehensive JS tool support almost impossible. I don’t mean dictating something, but maybe giving best practices. I don’t think most frameworks need more than (2) (plus maybe some kind of transformation that tools would not need to know about for syntactic analysis).
[1] http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/588755951/using-node-jss-sys-inherits
[2] http://ejohn.org/blog/simple-javascript-inheritance/
As an aside: If only we could transport the elegance of object literals to inheritance, somehow. Object.create() feels like a good start. I’ve tried my hand at a purely prototypal API, but I find it difficult to make the syntax as beautiful as plain object literals.
http://www.2ality.com/2011/01/going-completely-prototypal-in.html
--
Dr. Axel Rauschmayer
axel at rauschma.de
twitter.com/rauschma
home: rauschma.de
blog: 2ality.com
I take it that there might not be any standard support for inheritance in ES.next beyond what is already there?
My personal favorite would be to get even more into Self-style (or Cecil-style) class-less inheritance, but I realize that that’s not for everyone.
Until consensus is reached, how about the following interim solution?
(1) I think what is most needed is standard support for subtyping. Node.js has util.inherits(subtype, supertype) (was: sys.inherits) that provides the bare minimum. [1] This could be added to ES.next without involving too much baggage.
(2) Defining constructor plus prototype in a single construct is also helpful. I really like how Resig’s Simple Inheritance looks (externally ;-), because it equates a type with the protoype (=a single object literal) and does not change much of JS’s core beyond that.
For the sake of good tool support, some guidance should be given with regard to inheritance. The current mess of competing approaches makes comprehensive JS tool support almost impossible. I don’t mean dictating something, but maybe giving best practices. I don’t think most frameworks need more than (2) (plus maybe some kind of transformation that tools would not need to know about for syntactic analysis).
[1] rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/588755951/using-node-jss-sys-inherits [2] ejohn.org/blog/simple-javascript-inheritance
As an aside: If only we could transport the elegance of object literals to inheritance, somehow. Object.create() feels like a good start. I’ve tried my hand at a purely prototypal API, but I find it difficult to make the syntax as beautiful as plain object literals. www.2ality.com/2011/01/going-completely-prototypal-in.html