Hello, everyone 👋. I am a newcomer when it comes to JavaScript. I come from an OOP background (C# and Java). I’ve recently learned that ES6 has a class keyword that preforms similarly (but not exactly) to common OOP languages. Normally I would be inclined to use this feature in my projects; however, it came to my attention that the usage of class in JavaScript seems to be heavily discussed (mostly in a negative light). My questions to this community are:

  • Should it be used often, sparingly, or be outright avoided?
  • What are its advantages and disadvantages?
  • Are there specific cases where the usage of class excels?

Please share your thoughts.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•1 year ago

    It’s disliked because it uses a “class” keyword but it isn’t a class. JavaScript has prototypes, not classes.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•1 year ago

      I somehow feel like there’s an allergy of sort towards classes in general in JavaScript/TypeScript. Many projects I’ve worked on gravitate towards more functional/plain-old-objects sort of paradigm and it feels like classes are avoided just because they don’t feel like idiomatic JS.

    • DonjonMaisterOPEnglish
      0•1 year ago

      Yes. This seems to be one of the common arguments against “classes”: they’re not exactly classes in the traditional sense, and everything you can do in JavaScript can be done so without touching the class keyword. It’s basically syntactic sugar that adds more confusion to the language, or so I heard. I’ve read this article that explains the flaws behind with this feature: https://www.toptal.com/javascript/es6-class-chaos-keeps-js-developer-up