Throughout the module (and your journey to Google enlightenment while working on IdeaBox2.0) you may notice a few different ways that JavaScript code is being written.
That might have something to do with something called ES6 and ES5
- ES6 (ECMAScript6 or ECMAScript2015) is the latest update of ECMAScript (aka JavaScript). It has more than 20 new features from ES5. A lot of the updates seem familiar to ruby syntax, so I'd imagine it would be a bit more intuitive for me to learn than ES5.
- Transpilation refers to the transpformation of source code written in one language and producing the equivalent code in another programming language. Relating to ES6, there are compilation engines (doubt that's a real term) like Babel6, that will compile ES6 code into ES5. That allows us to write source code in ES6 and still have those programs work on javascript engines that haven't implemented the changes from ES5 to ES6 yet.
Looking at the ES6 Features link below, discuss one update from ES5 and if it seems useful/superfluous,
- One update I noticed is the concept of Classes in ES6. It seems a little superfluous, as it just wraps existing functionality in arguably more pleasing syntax. It's cool because it's closer to how I already perceive structures in Ruby, but I haven't worked with JS enough to really wrap my head around how much this would actually improve functionally/readability.