Beej's Bit Bucket

Someone on Hacker News asked for a concise description of “prototype” in JavaScript. I gave it a go, but the topic closed before I could post. So I saved it here for posterity.

And then I blew it out and made it considerable less concise, which might or might not be for the best, but you can be the judge of that.

Prototype-based inheritance in JavaScript can be a little bit strange to people accustomed to class-based inheritance, but it really doesn’t need to be difficult to grok. Like so many things, once you “get it”, it seems easy enough.
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