Why Babel Matters

Re:Why Babel Matters by VeejayRampay on Wednesday May 20, 2015 @03:55AM (#9575001)

Thanks for the links, much appreciated. The point I was making though is that ES6 definitely is another world in terms of complexity for newcomers. Things like variadic functions, generators, async/await, destructuring assignment are extremely nice additions that I'm psyched to see coming to the language, but they do add a certain layer of "real language" gravitas to a language that a lot of people in the workplace were merely using to create "directives" and "controllers" or to "get DOM elements". Javascript is not a toy anymore (hasn't been for years actually, but it's getting "real" now).

In the end though, you're right, everyone will take that step, the complexity is nothing overwhelming and those tools you're sharing will help make way for a great future on server and browser alike.

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Re:Why Babel Matters by eyko on Wednesday May 20, 2015 @06:39AM (#9575445)

EcmaScript is backwards compatible so you don't need to adopt the entire list of new shiny features at once. You can still continue to develop in your usual ES5 syntax and add a few ES6/7 features as you learn them.

In my case, I started with let/const and arrow functions. Then I added classes and hit a few walls, mainly because I hadn't read/understood much about arrow functions and the context they get bound to. After you start to use those, I think everything comes naturally (e.g. realising that the feature that allows you to import {foo, bar} from 'baz' is the same one that allows you to do var {foo, bar} = baz; Deconstruction is very handy, especially when you pass around big config variables and you only need a few bits from it. Not needing to use a promise library for async code is also great. Mixing up async/await with it is something I hadn't thought of until I read this article.

You slowly begin to adopt language features as you find them useful. It's not an all in or all out situation so I think the barrier to adoption is very, very low.

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Re:Why Babel Matters by tracker1 on Wednesday May 20, 2015 @05:47AM (#9575307)

Once you get to the point you can abstract your promises with async/await in a lot of places, utility methods/workers become so much simpler... I can't imagine how complicated some of my code would be without the ES7 stuff.

Promises, coroutines, async/await, lambda expressions, spread operators, destructuring... once you get used to it, you don't want to go back.

About the only abnormal thing I'm doing is overriding the global promise implementation with bluebird (even in current iojs), and using some of the extended methods... I've also been using ramda and fetch a lot.

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