Whenever I get involved in conversations revolving around classical inheritance in JavaScript, I usually have a couple of comments:

1. Geez! Man up and learn the f-in’ language!
2. JavaScript is a class-less language, why would you want to do classical inheritance?!

Comment 2 is usually followed by a variant of Comment 1.

Earlier this year, I wrote a short quip on not buying into Parasitic Inheritance trend. Prior to landing my current gig, I had interviewed with several companies that were employing it in their applications. The things they were doing were very cool, but the reason almost all stated for using it was that they didn’t have to use “new.” I brought up the issue that in order to create a descendant, you had to make an entire copy of the ancestor, then tack on the new methods; whereas natively, it was a simple graft of new methods onto the ancestor. It fell on deaf ears as they justified what they were doing by citing Crockford’s work on classical inheritance in JavaScript.

But I don’t think they read the very end of the article in which he states – in a bordered box no less – that his attempts to support classical inheritance in JavaScript was a mistake. Here’s the text:

I have been writing JavaScript for 8 years now, and I have never once found need to use an uber function. The super idea is fairly important in the classical pattern, but it appears to be unnecessary in the prototypal and functional patterns. I now see my early attempts to support the classical model in JavaScript as a mistake.

The challenge with JavaScript is that it is a wide open language; you can do just about anything with it. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should…

Yeah, I’ve heard all the complaints over the years – coming especially from former Java programmers. But I just keep on going back to the two comments I made above, especially the first comment. My belief is that if you’re programming in a particular language, learn the f-in’ language. Don’t try to place a different model or pattern on the language just because you’re used to programming in another language. To me, doing that is the ultimate in bullshit hubris. JavaScript is a powerful language, though admittedly it does have its shortcomings, but if you take the time to learn the mechanics of the language, there’s not much you can’t do with it.