Classes are Expressions

Just looks like more JavaScript antipatterns, this time with some ES6 flavour.<p>We know how to &quot;solve&quot; the problem of encapsulation with JavaScript. It&#x27;s not with closures, Symbols, or some other arbitrary hack. We do it by enforcing specific idioms that only require a developer to recognize <i>intent</i> instead of learning 80 different ways to do the same thing. You simply <i>put a single or double underscore</i> in front of the property name.<p>I read what I thought was a clever anecdote by another developer the other day, that the underscore in &quot;obj._varname&quot; indicates &quot;here be dragons.&quot; It&#x27;s an extremely simple idiom to teach new JavaScript developers.<p>I get it, JavaScript is robust. So you can do fun things like this! These are great experiments. But really, what are you accomplishing? You&#x27;ve now just thrown in a closure and a bunch of lines of code (defining your symbols, etc.) that any developer new to your codebase is going to look at like &quot;... what the... what is going on here?&quot; You can solve the problem easily with <i>one character</i>.<p>Consistency. Convention. Creating useful, easy-to-understand, repeatable idioms. That&#x27;s what we should be focusing on.

I guess I need to be schooled by why not just use closures?<p><pre><code> var Person = function(first last) { this.fullName = function() { return first + &quot; &quot; + last; }; this.rename = function(newFirst, newLast) { first = newFirst; last = newLast; }; }; </code></pre> Problem solved, you can&#x27;t access `first` and `last` outside the class. You might retort &quot;they&#x27;re bigger&quot; or something but just like everything else in JS they just need the right people to concentrate on them and they&#x27;ll likely get optimized.<p>I don&#x27;t get the relucatance to use the language&#x27;s features rather than hacks (using naming standards and compilers to obfusticate names and then cross fingers) or other hacks (Symbol). Really? You Really want me to write code using Symbol? That&#x27;s going to be awesome in the debugger. Let&#x27;s add a watch to &quot;weke30o304_first&quot;. Refresh, of shit it&#x27;s now &quot;gtgrf40r3fe_first&quot;, my watches all broke (T_T)<p>It also makes me sad the `class` spec didn&#x27;t take that into account so you could use a closure with a `class`.

I know this might be an unpopular view here, but declarative(ish) constructs like class give a little hope that programs will be more statically analyzable so that we can get nice things like static type checking and warnings, code completion, optimizing compilers, etc.<p>These types of imperative patterns make life extremely hard on tools, which now need to add in unreliable things like escape analysis to be able determine which classes are visible. Modules will help a little with explicit exports, so that the importing modules have some hope of tooling, but analysis within a module would suffer.

What about private functions? For now I just add `_` in front of their names, but the code would look so much cleaner if I had some kind of a `private` keyword.

This is cool, could this behavior be mimicked by doing:<p><pre><code> var name = &#x27;name_&#x27; + Math.random() ; &#x2F;&#x2F;assumed uniqueness</code></pre>