Is JavaScript's “new” keyword considered harmful?

Question

In another question, a user pointed out that the new keyword was dangerous to use and proposed a solution to object creation that did not use new.

Answer 1

Another case for new is what I call Pooh Coding. Winnie the Pooh follows his tummy. I say go with the language you are using, not against it.

Chances are that the maintainers of the language will optimize the language for the idioms they try to encourage. If they put a new keyword into the language they probably think it makes sense to be clear when creating a new instance.

Code written following the language's intentions will increase in efficiency with each release. And code avoiding the key constructs of the language will suffer with time.

EDIT: And this goes well beyond performance. I can't count the times I've heard (or said) "why the hell did they do that?" when finding strange looking code. It often turns out that at the time when the code was written there was some "good" reason for it. Following the Tao of the language is your best insurance for not having your code ridiculed some years from now.