Inheritance Patterns

While JavaScript has a native prototypal inheritance model, several patterns have been developed over the years to implement it. The classic way is using constructor functions. You define a parent constructor and a child constructor. To link them, you set the child's prototype to an instance of the parent (`Child.prototype = new Parent()`), and then reset the child's constructor property (`Child.prototype.constructor = Child`). You also need to call the parent's constructor from within the child's constructor using `Parent.call(this, ...)` to ensure parent properties are initialized on the new instance. This pattern is powerful but can be verbose and a bit confusing. To simplify this, ES6 introduced the `class` syntax. The `class` keyword provides a much cleaner and more familiar syntax for creating objects and implementing inheritance. You use `class Child extends Parent` to set up the prototype chain automatically. Inside the child's `constructor`, you use `super()` to call the parent's constructor. While this looks like classical inheritance, it's important to remember that it is just syntactic sugar over the same prototypal mechanics. Understanding both the classic pattern and the modern `class` syntax gives you a complete picture of how inheritance is achieved in JavaScript.