When asked what he might do differently if he had to rewrite Java from scratch, James Gosling suggested that he might do away with class inheritance and write a delegation only language.
Using inheritance as a vehicle for code reuse is a bit like ordering a happy meal because you wanted the plastic toy. Sure a circle is a shape and a dog is a mammal – but once we get past those textbook examples most of our hierarchies get arbitrary and tenuous – built for manipulating behaviour even as we pretend we are representing reality. Successive descendants are saddled with an ever increasing number of unexpected or irrelevant behaviours for the sake of re-using a few.
Delegation is a technique that promotes code reuse by allowing runtime function invocation in the context of a specific instance – regardless of the hierarchical lineage of instance and function. JavaScript has excellent support for Delegation in the form of call and apply which lets us inject an object into the this value of any function. This permits unfeterred code sharing, free from the constraints of unwieldy, unnatural and overly complex hierarchies.
I’m going to demonstrate, by way of a use case, how call and apply can promote a clean, functional approach code to re-use. Then I’ll discuss how the ES 5 specification enables re-use of built-in functions by formalizing the concept of generic functions.
JavaScript, JavaScript... 