JS: Leave the classes to those other languages
Who have never used pseudoclasses in JavaScript?
It’s too hard for a “traditional OO developer” to not use classes. They are his way to describe objects.
The first time I bumped into JS I was the “traditional developer” and the first question I asked to myself was how can I work with classes in JS?
JS does not have classes but I realised pretty soon there are plenty of solutions to fake classes.
Instead of understanding and embracing the language I gave up to the temptation of using my traditional languages (Ruby, Java, etc…) knowledge with JS and I started to work using pseudoclasses. I immediately realised that doing the same things I used to do in Ruby so smoothly were much harder and more verbose to do in JS.
If I didn’t want to end up hating JS I needed to learn how the language works in more depth.
This series of articles aims to answer essentially 2 questions:
- Why is so complicated to work with pseudoclasses?
- Do we really need to fake classes in JS?
To do so we will cover the following 3 points in distinct posts:
- JS Prototype chain mechanism
- Pseudoclasses and Prototypal Inheritance in JS
- Alternative patterns in JS: OLOO style
This topic was also the subject of the speech I presented as part of my Thoughtworks application process. Slides and video are available at the following links.
Let’s start our path understanding how the JS Prototype chain works.
