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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

HyperCard and AppleScript. And JavaScript is pretty unique at this point. Scala's OO is also pretty unique with traits and type members.

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How unique is JavaScript from SELF?

In regards to Scala, I would say OCaml has similar capabilities.

I think the biggest difference between Scala and OCaml is that Scala users don't (have to) tell beginners to avoid the OO part at all costs.

OO in OCaml feels as if the designers thought "we think OO sucks, so let's implement terrible support for OO to get our point across".

OCaml's object/class system is actually pretty good. It isn't used very often in OCaml because most of what OO gives you can be more naturally expressed in other parts of the language, but that doesn't mean that it's bad. In particular, classes are still the best mechanism for open recursion in OCaml, and should be used when that is what is required.

Scala's capabilities are not really comparable to OCaml, which doesn't even have traits. JavaScript has many influences beyond Self, and is enough of a mishmash even in its original form to have its own point in the list (at best, a not very similar descendant of self).

> Scala's capabilities are not really comparable to OCaml, which doesn't even have traits.

Yes, it has a bit of everything anyone thought about in FP in it.

However you can make use of traits like feature by mixing in modules and objects, while taking advantage of first class modules in OCaml.

> JavaScript has many influences beyond Self

Sure, but I am unaware of any that make it such a great language.

Scala's OO features are more like Java's done better. OCaml is this weird object system that is structural most of the time sometimes nominative, and then there is that weird ML module system. Ah...I totally forgot about Moby. [1]

JavaScript has been very successful, and got a whole generation of programmers playing around with prototypes without knowing it.

[1] http://moby.cs.uchicago.edu

Thanks for pointing out to Moby.

JavaScript's success has less to do with how good the language is, rather sharing the same fate as successful systems programming languages, by being the only gate to the kingdom.

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