I finished plowing though Anthony Alicea’s Udemy course, JavaScript: Understanding the Weird Parts, and found it to be quite satisfying. To answer the question left hanging yesterday, yes, the course did describe more details of prototype inheritance, and it did so in a way that confirmed my previous intuitions.
Where the course really paid off for me was when it spent a few lectures exploring the internals of the jQuery framework, with the (somewhat) surprising revelation that it leverages still another framework called Sizzle. That exploration showed how jQuery is constructed in a way that made the application of the course material seem tractable in popular and complex usage situations, and led to an excellent demonstration of using the same layout to build one’s own library or framework using the same techniques. I suspect I will be using just these methods when I get to turning my graph and discrete-event simulation projects into external libraries.
I particularly liked the way the object methods were appended to an object within a closure instead of outside of it, which makes the whole thing sit more cleanly on the page (or in the editor). I’ve found adding the function prototypes after the closure to be a bit unsatisfying.
I’m sure there’s a lot more going on in the JavaScript language that isn’t covered by this course, especially having to do with many of the additions in ES6 and with DOM events more generally, but I was pleased that my previous efforts had already led to a fairly deep understanding of the language. I plan to begin plowing into the React framework next, which I hope will give me more insight into how the event structure works.