Understanding JavaScript’s Prototypal Inheritance

You might have heard people say that “In JavaScript, Everything is an Object” .

If you are not familiar with what an object looks like, here is an example:

While this is not entirely true in every case, people still consider the above statement to be true because JavaScript is a prototype-based Object Oriented Programming Language, instead of class-based .

In JavaScript, there are two main types of values:

• Primitives — Strings, Numbers, Booleans, Undefined, and Null.
• Objects — Arrays, Functions, Dates

So, while everything in JavaScript is not an object, the not-object things get wrapped into an object while compilation, allowing JavaScript to do really complicated operations. Even if you think that a value in your code is not an object, chances are that JavaScript has wrapped it inside one.

For example, if we create an empty function named hero :

function hero() {}

And like I mentioned before, functions are also classed as objects in JavaScript. So if we add a property type to this function and print it out, you will see that hero function is now also an object.

function hero() {}
hero.type = 'superman'
console.log(hero)

//Output
{ [Function: hero] type: 'superman' }

This is one of many things that makes JavaScript so awesome! :raised_hands:

To understand what Prototypal Inheritance is, we first need to understand what an Object Oriented Language is.