Unraveling the JavaScript Prototype Chain: A Beginner’s Guide

Explore the fundamental concepts of prototypes and how they power inheritance in JavaScript

Photo by Karine Avetisyan on Unsplash

In the ever-evolving world of JavaScript, one of the core concepts that developers must grasp is the prototype chain. This often misunderstood mechanism is the foundation upon which JavaScript’s inheritance model is built. In this article, we’ll dive into the basics of prototypes and uncover how they shape the way objects and functions interact in your JavaScript code.

First, let’s understand what prototypes are. In JavaScript, every object has a special internal property called [[Prototype]], which is a reference to another object. This object is known as the prototype. The prototype serves as a template, providing default properties and methods that an object can inherit and use.

To demonstrate this, let’s look at a simple example:

const person = {
  name: 'John Doe',
  greet() {
    console.log(`Hello, my name is ${this.name}`);
  }
};

const john = Object.create(person);
john.greet(); // Output: Hello, my name is John Doe

In this example, we create an object called person with a name property and a greet() method. We then create a new object called john using Object.create(person)…