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What’s New in ES2019

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Re: What’s New in ES2019

#291

Post by z3t4 »

mantap wrote: post #247
mmartinson wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, JS is everywhere and serves many use cases. The implicit "we" in that statement is developers 2019 who are building client side applications that need to get a lot done, run in most installed browsers, and remain maintainable to a 5-8 year horizon. Not everyone for certain, but probably enough to generalize, at least on this forum.

You tell such users: "Your browser is too old, please update it" and direct them to the Chrome and Firefox websites. With the exception of Safari, all major browsers support auto-updating, and anybody who intentionally uses an outdated version of Safari is a masochist with a deviant fetish for error messages.

Feature phones, smart-tv/watches etc. do not auto update. Old versions of android, iOS, Windows. Non-mainstream OS's running non-mainstream browsers. 1% of the market is still a lot of users.

Re: What’s New in ES2019

#292

Post by kod »

mantap wrote: post #247
mmartinson wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, JS is everywhere and serves many use cases. The implicit "we" in that statement is developers 2019 who are building client side applications that need to get a lot done, run in most installed browsers, and remain maintainable to a 5-8 year horizon. Not everyone for certain, but probably enough to generalize, at least on this forum.

You tell such users: "Your browser is too old, please update it" and direct them to the Chrome and Firefox websites. With the exception of Safari, all major browsers support auto-updating, and anybody who intentionally uses an outdated version of Safari is a masochist with a deviant fetish for error messages.

Or y'know, someone who doesn't see a reason to purchase a new Apple device every N years of forced obsolescence.

Re: What’s New in ES2019

#293

Post by irrational »

pault wrote: post #158
simias wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not unique to JS. Some compilers took over a decade to implement C99 features. Most of us C coders were still defaulting to C89 for portability well into the late 00's. But now C99 is mainstream enough that you can (mostly) safely target it. If you never release new standards you'll never be able to use them. I realize that in JS world 4 years is basically an eternity so it's hard to project that far but I'm s…

> It's popular to be sure but handwritten javascript is not that rare nowadays, is it? Long time front end developer here. In the last couple of years I can't recall seeing even a single project without a build pipeline (not that they don't exist, I just haven't encountered them at my day job, first or third party).

I work for a Fortune 100 company and we still don't have a build pipeline :-(

Re: What’s New in ES2019

#294

Post by irrational »

baddox wrote: post #234
pault wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's popular to be sure but handwritten javascript is not that rare nowadays, is it? Long time front end developer here. In the last couple of years I can't recall seeing even a single project without a build pipeline (not that they don't exist, I just haven't encountered them at my day job, first or third party).

I don't understand what is so appealing about not having a build pipeline for JavaScript, other than the ability to very quickly test and learn things directly in the browser, which of course anyone can still do. For anything remotely important, you're almost certainly going to already want a build pipeline to do things like concatenating/minifying code, running tests, and deploying. Adding a transpilation step to ex…

>I don't understand what is so appealing about not having a build pipeline for JavaScript

We don't have one at my work (Fortune 100 company), but it has nothing to do with whether it is appealing or not. It has to do with the projects we are working on started years before there was any such thing as a build pipeline in the web world and it's not pragmatic to add one in at this point. Maybe some decade we will get the budget to start over from scratch (haha!) and get modern things like a build pipeline.

Re: What’s New in ES2019

#295

Post by irrational »

brlewis wrote: post #279
LukeBMM wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in broad terms, but as a counterpoint, those build pipelines are being created and used primarily by folks who initially learned by handwriting javascript. While less of a consideration for established teams, it dramatically raises the barrier to entry for those who are learning as well as those who currently have much simpler requirements. Those are the future members of that established team. Adding hurdles…

There are tools like create-react-app that configure complicated build pipelines for you, and there's parcel, a simple common-case build pipeline.

The biggest issue I've seen with these is that at some point they do break and then you need a knowledgeable person to fix it. The pipeline is basically a black box unless you possess the knowledge of how all the parts work and interact with each other.

Re: What’s New in ES2019

#296

Post by LukeBMM »

brlewis wrote: post #279
LukeBMM wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in broad terms, but as a counterpoint, those build pipelines are being created and used primarily by folks who initially learned by handwriting javascript. While less of a consideration for established teams, it dramatically raises the barrier to entry for those who are learning as well as those who currently have much simpler requirements. Those are the future members of that established team. Adding hurdles…

There are tools like create-react-app that configure complicated build pipelines for you, and there's parcel, a simple common-case build pipeline.

Again, just for the sake of playing Devil's Advocate, the fact that we rely entirely upon such helpers (and the overwhelming number of mutually exclusive options available) is a potential indicator that we're making it more complex than we have to[1].

The syntactic sugar that we're adding to make our own jobs easier is arguably making things disproportionately more difficult for anyone who doesn't already have the same baseline level of knowledge. That includes those who are trying to learn to do our jobs after we've all moved on. That would notably have also included all of us, earlier in our careers.

I'm just suggesting that it's worth considering whether that seems sustainable in the long run.

[1] ... for relatively simple tasks. Complex tooling happens to be a very good tool for complex tasks, like the sort of professional work that you seem to be referring to. No matter how good our hammer may be, however, not every task always wants to be a nail. create-react-app and parcel are examples of excellent hammers.

Re: What’s New in ES2019

#297

Post by tlrobinson »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #47

Now if we could just get pattern matching[1] and optional chaining[2], that would really elevate things. [1] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pattern-matching [2] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-optional-chaining

These two and decorators (including function/assignment decorators) are the top 3 on my wishlist.

Re: What’s New in ES2019

#298

Post by eropple »

irrational wrote: post #295
brlewis wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tools like create-react-app that configure complicated build pipelines for you, and there's parcel, a simple common-case build pipeline.

The biggest issue I've seen with these is that at some point they do break and then you need a knowledgeable person to fix it. The pipeline is basically a black box unless you possess the knowledge of how all the parts work and interact with each other.

I dunno how to put this in a non-controversial way, but...at some point, I switched from thinking a desirable, throw-the-money-at-them developer is somebody who writes a lot of code to somebody who understands things and is capable of understanding new ones when they arise.

I'm not saying that to excuse thrash. Thrash is bad. But like..."oh, at some point you'll have to have somebody who actually understands how the thing we use to make money works"--you should have that person anyway! It's an existential threat to your business not to.

Understanding things is our job. Unless you're somewhere where understanding things isn't valued, and 1) it's gonna eventually fail, and 2) you have better places to be.

Re: What’s New in ES2019

#299

Post by tlrobinson »

Dextro wrote: post #11
afandian wrote: post #3

It's great to see JS getting some of the features of better planned languages. But I'm still very nervous about some of the stuff mentioned here with regard to mutation. Taking Rust and Clojure as references, you always know for sure whether or not a call to e.g. `flat` will result in a mutation. In JS, because of past experience, I'd never be completely confident that I wasn't mutating something by mistake. I don't…

Yes, this is a real problem and I've been bitten by it more times than I can count. Now I always keep this handy website ready: https://doesitmutate.xyz/

I feel a better form for this site would be:

Mutates: push, pop, shift, unshift, splice, reverse, sort, copyWithin

Does Not Mutate: everything else

Re: What’s New in ES2019

#300

Post by [deleted] »

ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #130
stevenmays wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dig it too, but you could previously flatten an array with concat, and the spread operator. [].concat(...array) Lodash wasn't necessary.

Yeah but that reads so gross. Look at it. It’s actually painful. Much rather have the magic word “flat”

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