Question about prototypal inheritance need to be disambiguated from questions about the Prototype JavaScript library

Question

It's really annoying that a major JavaScript library decided to name itself after a language feature (imagine the confusion if there was a library called 'Array' or 'Strings'...) but that we have to work with now.

The problem is that there are a large number of questions about prototypical inheritance on Stack Overflow, because it is rather an unique language feature, and it would be useful to be able to look at questions about it just like one might use the oop tag. However, these questions are now buried under questions about the Prototype framework, which sees a larger volume of questions (at least in its early days; jQuery now dominates)

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this wasn't sorted out earlier (with the only discussion on the problem being this: Is the SO prototypejs tag correct?), so now we have to deal with this mess with more than 2200 questions tagged prototype and 400 tagged prototypejs. Oh, and don't forget about the 102 questions tagged prototypal-inheritance.

In addition to that, the prototype tag wiki states that the tag is used for questions about the library, but that would mean that there are now two tags for questions about the Prototype library, which is highly undesirable, and in addition to that, the tag prototypes is synonym'd to that tag, and you would never use prototypes for question about the Prototype library, and of course, no unique tag for question about prototypal inheritance. So... yeah, it's an almighty mess.

I propose two solutions, neither of which are desirable (because of the amount manual intervention needed) but here goes:

1. Since there are more questions about the library than about the concept, retag all questions in the prototype tag that are actually about the concept to prototypal-inheritance, synonym prototypes to prototypal-inheritance, and merge prototypejs to prototype.

2. Aggressively retag questions about the library to prototypejs, possibly rename prototypejs to something else like prototype-library to make it clear, and synonym prototypal-inheritance to prototype.

And in addition to that, edit the tag wiki of all of those tags to make it very clear which tag should be used for what, and have javascript regulars retag new questions aggressively.

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I would like for a vote on which of these solutions to adopt, to put this problem finally to rest. Or maybe another solution exist, which I would appreciate being put into a new answer

Answer 1

It's an awkward problem that exists in other tags too (e.g., sqlite is a mess, since it seems that nearly every language's integration library for it goes by the name SQLite – with variations in capitalization) so I fear that the only way forward is to manually disambiguate. This sort of problem is basically inherent in letting the community create tags; you end up with an inconsistent mess of an ontology. Good luck!

As for who gets the prototype tag itself, I'd be keener on letting it be the generic concept. After all, it could also apply to describing prototype versions of software too, so it's still going to be a problem even after you split it. In fact, that really means that the two cases you've identified (the JS library and the inheritance) should have their own tags and there's a need to say that neither of them should be tagged with the abstract concept (unless actually merited).

Answer 2

I've wondered about this myself and I'm fully in support of disambiguation.

Since the library is built on the concept / language feature, and not the other way around, I think it makes more sense to give the concept the shorter prototype tag. Since, as you say, there are currently more questions about the library, we can do a mass retag of prototype to prototypejs, and then leave it to individuals to revert those about the concept back to prototype.

Answer 3

I've been looking at the various prototype-related tags recently. Following on from this question, I have been retagging questions tagged with prototype to prototypejs as appropriate (in fact, I am now alerted via the tag RSS feed to any new question tagged prototype and I check each one to see if should be retagged). The tag wikis for both tags now make it clear what they should be used for.

However, I think there is still some work to be done on other tags containing the word "prototype". This is what I would suggest:

• Merge prototype-oriented (10 questions) into prototype-programming (191 questions)

  • The prototype-programming tag wiki excerpt makes this tag sound appropriate for both:

    a type of object-oriented programming that eschews the use of classes.

• Maybe merge rapid-prototyping into prototyping. If not, add short explanations of the differences to tag wikis.

• Remove the prototyping tag from questions (96) that are not about the software engineering concept. Many of these questions refer to JavaScript object prototypes, and should therefore be tagged prototype.

• Merge prototypal (7 questions) and maybe prototype-chain (4 questions) into prototypal-inheritance (147 questions)

That just leaves function-prototypes (73 questions), subroutine-prototypes (3 questions) and prototype-scoped (1 question). I'm not sure what should be done with those yet, if anything.

Answer 4

It would be sweet to have a more intelligent merge, i.e. prototype not occurring with javascript or ruby-on-rails would be considered as the language feature (clear that it's one of the few other languages implementing it).

I'm personally for having prototype to be the library since more or less everyone ever doing something with JavaScript has heard about it but chances are that if you're a JavaScript newbie you never heard about prototypal inheritance. It's not a feature you learn about at day 1 and you can write fairly advanced JavaScript without ever needing to toy with it.