GAL Study Group #1: ES6 Stuff!

Agenda:

TLDR;

• Anna has a few videos to show
• Put it into practice
• Share & Discuss

Topic

• What is an ES6?

  • ECMAScript 6 (ES6) is the sixth major release of the ECMAScript language specification. ECMAScript is the “proper” name for the language commonly referred to as JavaScript. 1

• Where can I use this new syntax? Is it supported?

  • You can see which browsers support which features here, in the compatibility table.
  • You can also transpile your code from ES6 to the more widely supported ES5 we all know and love. Lots of folks use Babel.

• Why should I learn it?

  • Awesome new features let you bind context (this) more easily, write more concisely (no more writing function a hundred million times), handle ansynchronicity (I Promise hyuk hyuk) more easily, and communicate your intentions to other developers (let vs. const for example). Check out this article for some thoughts!
  • You'll probably see it a lot now if you write any React code, but you'll be seeing a lot of these features in more places as time goes by.

Video!

Practice

• I've included a couple of files written in regular JS for us to practice re-writing in ES6. Let's work on these, then demonstrate and discuss!

Next Week

• What do we want to learn?
• Who volunteers to research it?

References I Used

1. http://dev.venntro.com/2013/09/es6-part-1/
2. https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/03/09/6-reasons-need-learn-javascript-es6-now-not-later/
3. http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/
4. https://babeljs.io/
5. https://egghead.io