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Showing posts from April, 2015

ECMAScript 6

Today is a rather significant one for me as JavaScript/Rails programmer because Sprockets ( https://github.com/rails/sprockets ) upgraded to version 3 meaning I can now use the Sprockets-es6 gem ( https://github.com/josh/sprockets-es6 ) to transpile ES6 JavaScript to ES5. Now to those that didn't understand the last paragraph, here's what it means... The language we commonly call JavaScript is actually formally known as ECMAScript ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript) . Since 2009 all the major browsers have been interpreting ECMAScript version 5. In fact they mostly still do. Version 6 is due to be formalised any day now (well, June 2015) which means that a whole new slew of functionality is due to be added to the language (class constructors, formal inheritance, fat arrows, etc...). Browser makers will start implementing these new features once the spec is complete. All of this sounds great, but for 2 things 1) I want to start using ES6 today 2) Even if the ne