Troubleshooting Javascript & Backbone - part 1

In this series of articles I try to tackle several of the most common and most annoying issues you might encounter working with JavaScript. I present a very simple Backbone application that starts to show some strange behaviour. To find out what's going on, and the best way to handle it, I'll have a look at the way JavaScript passes around variables, the prototypical inheritance, the prototype chain and several other JavaScript intricacies.