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A Brief Introduction to Closures and Lexical Scoping in JavaScript
“Writing in ECMAScript language without understanding closure is like writing Java without understanding classes” — Douglas Crockford, father of JSON
In this piece, we are going to discuss closures and lexical scoping in JavaScript. Understanding closures leads to a better understanding of programming itself. If you are planning on becoming a professional programmer, questions regarding closures and their applications are widely asked during technical interviews and can be really helpful to you.
If you are a JavaScript Developer, chances are you already using closures and just don't know it. There are so many complex examples out there that just confuse you when you try to learn closures, so I’ll be using the simplest examples I could find and by the end of this piece, you should have a basic understanding of what closures are. Let's get started.
Lexical Scoping
Before we can discuss closures, we should have a basic understanding of the scope and lexical scope. JavaScript has lexical scoping with function scope, which means each function creates a new scope.
What is function scope?
