❓ A Question That Confused Me

As we continue learning Object-Oriented Programming, I want to pause for a moment and discuss something that often comes up for JavaScript developers.

When we hear about OOP, we usually hear about classes.

class User { constructor ( name ) { this . name = name ; } }

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We've discussed that classes are used to create objects.

Fair enough.

But then we look at JavaScript codebases and see something like this:

function createUser ( name ) { return { name }; }

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No class.

No constructor.

No new keyword.

And yet, we're still creating objects.

This raises a very reasonable question:

What is this called?…