Classes Versus Prototypes: Some Philosophical and Historical Observations

In the recent years an alternative to the traditional class-based object-oriented language model has emerged. In this prototype-based paradigm [Bor86, Lie86, LTP86, Ste87, UnS87, SLU88, DMC92, Bla94] there are no classes. Rather, new kinds of objects are formed more directly by composing concrete, full-fledged objects, which are often referred to as prototypes. When compared to class-based languages, prototype-based languages are conceptually simpler, and have many other characteristics that make them suitable especially to the development of evolving, exploratory and distributed software systems.