[gcau]

The poster you're replying to is plain wrong, using "class" is ubiquitously common in the javascript/typescript world, it's the idiomatic way to create classes, and it has better semantics than trying to use prototypes. You might compile away the class keyword for compatibility, though.

[kbolino]

But you don't have to do either of those things. There's a third way, with functions and bare objects. I'm not sure that's what GP meant, but a lot of the JS I've written (which tends to be for the browser, mostly vanilla, and quick-and-dirty, to be fair) never touches classes or prototypes. The JSON data being produced/consumed is just a bag of fields, the operations on the document are just top-level functions, events get handled in callback closures, responses to HTTP requests get handled with promises, etc. Sprinkle in some JSDoc comments and you even get fairly workable autocomplete suggestions. Of course, the web APIs are built on prototypes/classes, so it's not like they're totally absent. But with things like data attributes, querySelector, and HTML templates, the usual needs for my own code to be OOP (or even structs-with-methods a la Go/Rust) just don't emerge that much.

[arscan]

Yeah, I would do a lot with plain objects, and using closures and iifes to do encapsulation and what-not. It was ugly and a bit of a pain, but once you learned how it all worked it made sense and was doable. I felt that classes were a bit of a bolt-on that violated my own internal understanding of how JavaScript worked, but by that point I was moving on to other stuff so never really got used to it.

[threetonesun]

I'm not denying the existence of class in JavaScript, but at least from what I've seen when React went to functions so did most of the JavaScript community that had moved to class based syntax, except for those who worked with Java/C# as well.

[thunderfork]

I think the real sign of this is a class where all the members are static, or pure data classes - ie, classes as a default rather than classes for things where classes make sense