Nami W namiwang

Moving to ES6 from CoffeeScript

I fell in love with CoffeeScript a couple of years ago. Javascript has always seemed something of an interesting curiosity to me and I was happy to see the meteoric rise of Node.js, but coming from a background of Python I really preferred a cleaner syntax.

In any fast moving community it is inevitable that things will change, and so today we see a big shift toward ES6, the new version of Javascript. It incorporates a handful of the nicer features from CoffeeScript and is usable today through tools like Babel. Here are some of my thoughts and issues on moving away from CoffeeScript in favor of ES6.

While reading I suggest keeping open a tab to Babel's learning ES6 page. The examples there are great.

Punctuation

Holy punctuation, Batman! Say goodbye to your whitespace and hello to parenthesis, curly braces, and semicolons again. Even with the advanced ES6 syntax you'll find yourself writing a lot more punctuatio

This is a simple snippet for adding a loading screen to a Polymer application. It is useful if your Polymer application is rather large and some users may be on a very slow internet connection.

The basic idea is that a very simple (and small) loading screen page will be loaded by the browser. When the browser has fully loaded and displayed the loading page then it will start loading all the files required for the Polymer application.

For a further speed improvement: the loading.css, and polymerAppLoader.js files can be placed inline with the index.html thus reducing the amount of files to be loaded from the server.

filestoload.html is a seperate file so that the usual grunt/gulp build functions can still be applied as before. Shouldn't require re-writting your build scripts.

Any improvements/comments are encouraged.

Long Live CoffeeScript and Long Live ES6

Clearly ES6 is a huge improvement over ES5, and tools like [6to5][] allow us to use these cool features now. I was reading [Replace CoffeeScript with ES6][replace coffeescript] by [Blake Williams][] and thought it was a great summary of how ES6 solves many of the same problems that CoffeeScript solves; however I'd like to comment on a few of Blake's points and talk about why I'll be sticking with CoffeeScript.

Classes

Classes in ES6 (like many of the syntax changes in ES6) are very similar to the CoffeeScript equivalent. To support browsers that are not fully ES5 compliant (e.g. IE8-), however, we still can't really use getters/setters, so ignoring these the comparison is:

PLEASE DON'T USE THIS GUIDE

It's over 9 years old (as of 2024-02-18), there are many better guides! You might like https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

% Let's build a binary tree!

Let's build a binary tree of strings in Rust. To recap, each node in a binary tree:

must have a value

Last night, Brian Shirai unilaterally "ended" the RubySpec project, a sub-project of Rubinius (the alternative Ruby implementation which Brian was paid to work on full-time from 2007 to 2013). The blog post describing his reasons for "ending" the project led to a big discussion on Hacker News.

When a single, competing Ruby implementation tells that you its test suite is the One True Way, you should be skeptical. Charles Nutter, Ruby core committer and JRuby head honcho, spent a lot of time last night on Twitter talking to people about what this decision means. He's probably too busy and certainly too nice of a guy to write about what is a political issue in the Ruby community, so I'm going to do it on behalf of all the new or intermediate Rubyists out there that are confused by Brian's decision and what it me

A Primer on Ruby Method Lookup

Method lookup is a simple affair in most languages without multiple inheritance. You start from the receiver and move up the ancestors chain until you locate the method. Because Ruby allows you to mix in modules and extend singleton classes at runtime, this is an entirely different affair.

I will not build contrived code to exemplify the more complicated aspects of Ruby method lookup, as this will only serve to confuse the matter.

When you pass a message to an object, here is how Ruby finds what method to call:

	# install openjdk
	sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk

	# download android sdk
	wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r24.2-linux.tgz

	tar -xvf android-sdk_r24.2-linux.tgz
	cd android-sdk-linux/tools

	# install all sdk packages

	## From Lynda.com course 'RSpec Testing Framework with Ruby'

	describe 'Expectation Matchers' do

	describe 'equivalence matchers' do

	it 'will match loose equality with #eq' do
	a = "2 cats"
	b = "2 cats"
	expect(a).to eq(b)

	path = require 'path'
	webpack = require 'webpack'
	exec = require 'exec-sync'


	gemDir = (name) ->
	exec('bundle show ' + name)

	refileDir = path.join(gemDir('refile'), 'app/assets/javascripts')
	jqueryRailsDir = path.join(gemDir('jquery-rails'), 'vendor/assets/javascripts')

	var mediaJSON = { "categories" : [ { "name" : "Movies",
	"videos" : [
	{ "description" : "Big Buck Bunny tells the story of a giant rabbit with a heart bigger than himself. When one sunny day three rodents rudely harass him, something snaps... and the rabbit ain't no bunny anymore! In the typical cartoon tradition he prepares the nasty rodents a comical revenge.\n\nLicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license\nhttp://www.bigbuckbunny.org",
	"sources" : [ "http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/gtv-videos-bucket/sample/BigBuckBunny.mp4" ],
	"subtitle" : "By Blender Foundation",
	"thumb" : "images/BigBuckBunny.jpg",
	"title" : "Big Buck Bunny"
	},
	{ "description" : "The first Blender Open Movie from 2006",
	"sources" : [ "http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/gtv-videos-bucket/sample/ElephantsDream.mp4" ],