Javascript Goes Back to Class

Not long ago at a user group I saw a strange piece of sample code like this on an overhead projector:

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class Person {

  constructor(firstName, lastName) {
    this.firstName = firstName;
    this.lastName = lastName;
  }

  fullName() {
    return this.firstName + ' ' + this.lastName;
  }

}

I chuckle a little bit inside. I’ve heard plenty of arguments over the years that Javascript’s prototypical inheritance was the right way to do things and trying to force traditional OO on Javascript was doing it all wrong:

If you’re creating constructor functions and inheriting from them, you haven’t learned JavaScript. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been doing it since 1995. You’re failing to take advantage of JavaScript’s most powerful capabilities. — Eric Elliot

It turns out ECMAScript 6 has officially added class style OO to the language. So the needs of many occasional Javascript developers to have a more familiar looking construct that would be at home in Java, C#, or Ruby eventually won.