Keeping pace with the latest JS progress? it's mad, I know.
I would like however to talk about the fundamental staff which is changing under our feet, more precisely - ES6.
ES6 or ECMAScript 2015 (catchy, indeed...) was recently finalized and all the web is swarming about it, though the browsers do not fully support it, which is like showing a candy to a child but behind a glass window.
Thing is, that along side with it came the era of Transpilers with TypeScript and CoffeeScript standing out from the rest and for a long time I was trying to decide which path is more reasonable to follow.
I know that the comparison is not exactly symmetric, but you have to admit that ES6 can sometimes be seen as a mere transpiler especially when using Babel, though it is not... and TypeScript is gaining more and more popularity now that Angular decided to embrace it on their 2nd version, added to that VSCode which support TypeScript so nicely and you have a nice debate inside your head.
Having said all the above, I would like to share my reasons of why I think on going with ES6.
ES6 is not a Transpiler Syntax
Setting Babel aside for a minute, ES6 is the new standard of writing JS soon to be embraced with it's full capabilities by every browser which respects itself. This will not be a ES5 under the hood, but rather a JS engine which knows to read and execute the new syntax, with optimizations which come along. This is an important thing to understand, for most transpilers convert their syntax to plain ES5.Now TypeScript can transpile their content into ES6, with features that keep on adding to the supported stack, but you need to realize that the process today will probably look like this -
TypeScript >> ES6 >> ES5
Since we said that browsers do not support the full spec and so we have to transpile ES6 to ES5, which does not make much sense to me.
TypeScript is a proprietary Transpiler
Yes, you know it.Microsoft is the proud parent of TypeScript. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but it kinda makes you think of it's future, whereas ES6 is the De-facto ECMA standard which does not belong to anyone.
Don't know about you, but I remember some time ago that one Steve Jobs (and many top industry personas followed) said that having a proprietary technology is bad and this is one of the reasons Flash should be banned from the web. So why treat TypeScript any different?
This can mean that Microsoft might cease to support it, or go in a direction which fits it's own interests but not the common web development agenda.
You can look at GWT as Google's sort-of proprietary transpiler. Where the hell is it now?
Babel is cool
Damn it's cool.If you don't know what Babel is please go and check it out. There is nothing too complex about it, just a simple tool which takes your ES6 and spits out ES5 on the other end. There are other tools which do that, but Babel seem to be the one growing on the community these days.
BTW - It's also very interesting to see how it implements the new ES6 capabilities into an old ES5 implementation.
One more thing - you can also run node on ES6 mode, with babel-node, which is cool cause you can start writing the backend in ES6 as well.
But please note - this is ES5 in the end, so what you're getting from it is just the chance to experience with ES6 and perhaps you will lose some performance over what Babel does with the code in order to convert it to ES5.
So basically, what I'm saying is this:
Soon all new JS code will be ES6 and browsers will support it to the fullest.
ES6 does not belong to any cooperation and you can start using it now, to the fullest, with tools like Babel, and later on, you will simply drop Babel from the stack and stay with the JS engine of your chosen platform.
You simply prepare for the future, with basically no risks... why not go there?
Do you feel I'm missing something here?
Do you have a reason not to start coding in ES6?
Please share...
Cheers
