Does JavaScript have classes?

A friend and I had an argument last week. He stated there were no such things as classes in JavaScript.

I said there was as you can say var object = new Object()

He says “as there is no word class used. It’s not a class.”

Who is right?

Edit: July 2017

JavaScript classes introduced in ECMAScript 2015 are primarily syntactical sugar over JavaScript’s existing prototype-based inheritance. The class syntax is not introducing a new object-oriented inheritance model to JavaScript. JavaScript classes provide a much simpler and clearer syntax to create objects and deal with inheritance.

– Mozilla ES6 Classes: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Classes

class Rectangle {
  constructor(height, width) {
    this.height = height;
    this.width = width;
  }
}

Answer

Technically, the statement “JavaScript has no classes” is correct.

Although JavaScript is object-oriented language, it isn’t a class-based language—it’s a prototype-based language. There are differences between these two approaches, but since it is possible to use JavaScript like a class-based language, many people (including myself) often simply refer to the constructor functions as “classes”.