I don't understand writable and configurable property attributes of Objects

Question

I don\'t understand the Writable and Configurable attributes of Objects. For example, in the MDN for Object.prototype, there is a table where I can clearly see that Configur

Answer 1

What the MDN is referring to is the property prototype of Object itself. You cannot overwrite Object.prototype itself. If you try and make Object.prototype undefined, that will fail:

Object.prototype = 1;
console.log(Object.prototype); // [object Object]

If you try this in strict mode, you will get a TypeError upon attempting to assign to a non-writable property:

'use strict';
Object.prototype = 1; // TypeError: Cannot assign to read only property 'prototype' of function Object() { [native code] }

You can write to an object's own properties without changing what the object's reference is, and those have separate attributes. For example, see this:

var descriptor = Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(Object.prototype, 'toString');

console.log(descriptor.writable); // true
console.log(descriptor.enumerable); // false
console.log(descriptor.configurable); // true

There is a separate [[Extensible]] internal property that prevents the creation of new properties on an object -- this is set to false if you call Object.preventExtensions, Object.seal or Object.freeze.

Note that it's not a good idea to call Object.freeze on something like Object.prototype, as really weird things can happen:

Object.freeze(Object.prototype);
var building = {};
building.name = 'Alcove Apartments';
building.constructor = 'Meriton Apartments Pty Ltd';
console.log(building.constructor); // function Object() { [native code] } 

Just like the previous example, it will also throw a TypeError in strict mode.

Basically, even though it would be a property on the object itself, it uses the attributes from the prototype chain to check whether or not it can assign the property. This has been considered as a mistake in the language by some people, however others consider this behaviour to be by design.