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Cover image for πŸŽ‰πŸ‘¨β€πŸ‘©β€πŸ‘§β€πŸ‘§ JavaScript Visualized: Prototypal Inheritance

πŸŽ‰πŸ‘¨β€πŸ‘©β€πŸ‘§β€πŸ‘§ JavaScript Visualized: Prototypal Inheritance

Lydia Hallie on January 03, 2020

Ever wondered why we can use built-in methods such as .length, .split(), .join() on our strings, arrays, or objects? We never explicitly specified ...
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mukeshsharma1201 profile image
Mukesh Kumar

You should really make a tutorial for creating these beautiful Gifs as well :)

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Lydia Hallie • Edited

Lmao β€œhi guys welcome to my tutorial today we start off by having caffeine-induced insomnia and getting random ideas for animated gifs using Keynote at 4AM...”. But I may actually totally do it if it can help people :)

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Sahithyan

yes. please do it. The GIFs are awesome. "Tell us how" in a video.

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combizs

I just auth'd to the community so I can β™₯️ the parent comment and compliment how awesome the GIF is. easy to read, clean transition and carries the point across.

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savokiss

Please do it!

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kp profile image
KP

please do it!

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Ivo Pauly

Please do it!

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Avnish

Please do it

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EJ-Buggs

please do it! I just created an account just so I could comment, heart, unicorn, and save this for reference. Explaining things in such a visual way in beyond helpful. Thank you.

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tenxswej

Hello πŸ‘‹ Could you please tell me which tool did you use to illustrate the codes in this post?? I really need this..

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Amartya Aishwarya

Would love to see that tutorial

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meeru7

hi, i am a beginner.
a question: what about Getters and Setters in reference to Constructor functions?
Please refer any resource specific to this.
Regards.

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mjmhtjain

i second that

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Precious adeyinka

Yes please, lydia I was just gonna ask it will mean alot to me, thank you mukesh for asking this question ur great mate!πŸ˜‰

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draczihper

Hey @lydiahallie I'm following up on the making gifs tutorial, did you make it?πŸ˜‚

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Sebastian Vargr • Edited

Prototype, no one really uses it directly but it is one of the main architectural points of the language...

Instead we now have class, because, then we can look more like C# and Java, yay for pointless uniformity!

I wonder how pop JS would have looked today if we didn’t have all the baggage from poorly researched classical languages. :)

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Jan KΓΌster

I already mentioned in another discussion that still I wonder why prototypical inheritance is rarely taught at CS or SE classes. It's a very strong paradigm and mostly misused due to misunderstanding.

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Sebastian Vargr

Having used JS’s version 10-12’ish years ago days I can definitely understand why.

I had a lot of problems making it have good verbosity, I might give it a go again sometime, back then I was kind of a rookie. :)

That being said, I think it comes down to familiarity, most languages are made to resemble classical OOP and their structures, the commonly accepted truth has been that is was the most optimal way.

But if we look back, most of those features were based on popularity and not research on what would be better to manage state, have high verbosity etc.

Just look at Java literally founded on hype, but I digress, I am seeing a strong pull towards more diverse paradigms, it will be interesting to see were that takes us. :)

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Michael Kochell

It reminds me of how interpreters evaluate variables through different closures/scopes. If it's not in this scope, let's check the next one, and so on. Once we've checked everything up to global scope and still haven't found the variable, it is considered undefined. Very useful information.

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Sloan, the sloth mascot
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Sebastian Vargr

Not really, but I can see how you could interpret it like that.

I’m not sure how to help you understand how proper debate is done in this context.

But an accusation without argumentation is a really bad way to start a conversation. :/

Honestly it pissed me off a bit.
But maybe we can turn this around?

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Sloan, the sloth mascot
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Lydia Hallie

Okay let’s stop this discussion here or continue on hackernews lol

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sebbdk profile image
Sebastian Vargr

Actually yes, you could have asked for sources, and I could have given them.

Instead you decided to attack my intentions, which you have no way of knowing.

Please think about this before you comment more. I’ve given up my initial annoyance/insulted feelings, that was not easy, you clearly have not.

I’m not trying to keep some kind of moral high ground here, but I don’t know were to meet you if you keep this level of unwillingness to have a constructive debate.

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Pablo Reyes

In the end you married or no?

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George Jempty

Why did you necro this?

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Vincenzo Chianese

It'd probably be a better language.

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Emma Bostian ✨

You have a true gift for blogging. Keep on writing!

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aRtoo

the GOAT! suggestion for the next topic is this. hehe. thank you for this. :)

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Lydia Hallie

Good idea!

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Pablo Tejada
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Adriaan Beiertz

Excellent articles, excellent visuals. Here's a resource I used to drill this down, with excellent explanations and visuals as well: objectplayground.com/

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Michael Lee

Came here with a "yeah, I understand JS prototypes but a visualization could be cool" and then realized how much this exceeded expectations. Great job with not just the explanations but also the animated graphics. Nicely done indeed.

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Richard Lenkovits

This is awesome. It made me realize again that there are a lot of things I 'just use' without understanding it. Which is bad. :D

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umashankar

It was Yesterday, when i was working on project. Inspecting Front-end code with google chrome dev tools and this thought struck my mind who would've written all these codes,where they came from.

thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i...

And this day i found this article explaining everything very beautifully.
Thank you!

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Nighty Greek

The main reason that i subscribed to this site it was just to write you here a huge Congratulations and Thanks for making so simple the whole concept of Prototyps in JS. Really you gave me a huge boost to keep reading and practising the OOP part of JS that it can be useful for React.
Your series of visualized concepts of JS is a amazing work and a quite productive way to teach very easy complicated -at least for us the beginners- concepts!
Again thank you!

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perez11abel

The amount of YouTube videos and articles I've read and I could not understand prototypes. I really enjoyed Your article. Everything was super clear and concise and made the most since for me (a beginner.)

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Pablo Tejada

Good read. All this time I thought of JS prototype as a cool way to add functionality to objects that have already been instantiated. It all makes sense now :)

Seeing how an object is composed from a class was cool too.

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Robert P.

Thank you Lydia! πŸ™‚

Very good article, easy to follow along and understand. This helped solidifying the knowledge I've previously learned before being linked here, but I've also got a rough idea on classes now. Classes seemed so weird until now πŸ˜‚

Nice gifs too!

I can't wait to read your other articles.

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bigleegeek1

Your visual JS posts are the best for newbies as they provide the pertinent info needed!

bigleegeek

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Claudine

Thank you so much for this awesome tutorial! Well explained. I finally understand what all those _proto_ mean in my console πŸ˜‚

Love your gif, they're very practical for understanding.

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CHARAN

Best article with visualize so great.Im a begginer,Classes are very new to me . By reading this article, I understand very clearly.All the concepts are animation.Thank you so much Mam❀️❀️. It helps me a Lot

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alonedatascientist

Very helpful. Thank you.

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Jay

Superb! I'm learning React at the moment and this helped me understand some of the structure of Class based components!

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Lydia Hallie • Edited

That's great! Yeah it's definitely an important thing if you want to understand what's really going on when you're using React.

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Hina-softwareEngineer

Nice effortπŸ‘πŸ‘πŸ‘

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Tobias

πŸ₯Ί

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Ignatius Sani

Informative article

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EricWu91

Awesome content! I've been constructing objects in Javascript for a while, and never thought about adding methods directly to the prototype to save memory.

Thanks for that! πŸŽ‰

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Ben Halpern

Wow, these are great!

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Aritra Mukherjee

The animated diagrams help a lot! Thanks. ☺

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Gamze Erol

it was an issue I was working on these days. Thank you, Lydia. With this animations, i completely figure out 🀩

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Richard Toth

Yhea, I am fond of your articles. Could you write one about book recommendation?

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Williams Oluwafemi • Edited

Lydia, I really admire how articulate and visual your posts are, great article as usual. Keep up the awesome work :)

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Lydia Hallie

Thanks!!

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Zafer

Excellent! Must have been hard to prepare

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Vaibhav Namburi

Hey @lydia! Just discovered this and your twitter!

Amazing work pushing such excellent content soon after coming out of a bootcamp! Looking forward to all your future content!

subscribed

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Zamir Narro πŸ‡΅πŸ‡ͺ

You made it easy to follow and understand. Thanks Lydia! πŸ€—

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Habdul Hazeez

Simply amazing!

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Lydia Hallie

Thank you!

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Berns Fire Death

This rules. The gifs make it exciting and clear to what is happening, your explanations are simple and fun! Thank you!

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Mohamed Hesham

amazing article

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phatsss

i really love your Gifs lolz

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David Islam

Well explained!

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Prafulla Raichurkar

Wow! This explanation makes it crystal clear

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Sakib Ahmed

great!!!!!!!!! describing was easy

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Dima Vakatsiienko

Hi! How do you create such a cool looking pictures with diagrams and animations?

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dvakatsiienko profile image
Dima Vakatsiienko

hello!
how do you create such a cool looking animations and disagrams?

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Carlos Rangel

I came here guided by the Odin Project, and your explanation is really clear and concise. Thanks :)

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Dennis Cao

wow, thank you for this article, tried many online sources - YT , other articles. this one really fully explained it, really appreciate the gifs as well.

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Priyadarshini Chettiar

Amazing article ❀️

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Roey Herzel

Awesome article! Which node console/repl did you use for the gifs? That object explorer (expand) is super useful

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ZuoZuomu

good job!

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Poplingue

Β« Daisy is cute, Jack is fearless Β» but nice article anyway.

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Ricardo el coder

Hi! Awesome article. I had a little question, how do you do that amazing animations?

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Sloan, the sloth mascot
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ziizium profile image
Habdul Hazeez
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Ruthiel Trevisan

Thank you so much for this lessons.
The GIF's are amazing and it is easy to understand.

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mukeshsharma1201 profile image
Mukesh Kumar

Can you please tell me about Function overloading and overriding in Javascript?

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Daniel

great article

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Julio Saraiva

@theavocoder, In the last example, why me there is a proto if only Functions there is a prototype?

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Nabil Kazi

Which tool do you use to craft these beautiful code flow and animations? Would love to hear about that.

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Prabhakaran

Very good explanation with images, loves it.

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Pablo

This was awesome. Recently completed the OOP section on freeCodeCamp and your article helped me cement those concepts

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Vaibhav Khulbe

Wow, superbly explained...better than my professors!

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Lydia Hallie

Lol thank you!

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Mourad Bougarne

It's just a JavaScript there is no magic there, even Prototyping is a JavaScript that helps in extend, add extra custom functionality to an existing object. Am I wrong?

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Patryk Bernasiewicz

I love how you can make your articles so informative and in the same time, so super-fun to read. All the best to you!

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Jingles (Hong Jing) • Edited

Great article and beautiful graphics to explain concepts! Keep writing more, we will be reading...

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Robert Boespflug

This is amazing thank you!!

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Trisha Aguinaldo

This is such a cool article! Thank you for sharing ❀️

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tanth1993 profile image
tanth1993

thank you for your sharing. now I know why we don't need to code: arr.prototype.filter(...), but arr.filter(..).

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Adrian Adam Ε»ywno

You've done a beautiful job at taking a complicated topic and making it easy to digest. Your visualizations and brevity allow for this. Many thanks!

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Armando Endzelis

Hi there.. Exist a difference between using:

me = Object.create(person) and,
me.prototype = Object.create(person.prototype)

Thank you for your great tutorial.

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CodingFunky

This really helped me understand the concepts :)

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Adarsh K.

πŸ™ Thank you for sharing this, very well explained.

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Mohamed ABDELLANI

You did a great job. Thank you !

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Emma Indal

Thank you Lydia, great job, again!!

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Lydia Hallie

Thank you Emma!

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Mateusz SkrobiΕ›

"A chihuahua is (somehow... 😐) still a dog." hahaha :D Great article btw!!!! <3