Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

"you can start using it right now" if you don't care about IE8, IE9, IE10, and many mobile browsers and are willing to ignore 20% of your customers.

e.g: http://caniuse.com/#search=let

const does not have block scope in those browsers either, but will work, adding to your debugging confusion.

template literals and multiline string has no IE support at all (you need edge: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...) so you can forget most most enterprise clients

Similar things are missing for most features from the article.

I wonder how many JS dev have to answer to actual customers because none of my clients in the last decade who would have accepted to have a possible failure on 1/5 of their visitors. Are they all bloggers or working in hype start ups ?




We use Babel to compile ES6/ES7/ES8 to ES5.

https://babeljs.io


It's not what the article is about. The article is obviously talking about native ES6 features, otherwise it would advertise es7 features as well and advise to use transpilers.


There's no reason why someone using babel needs to use ES2016+ features, they can stick to ES2015 just like this article.

I'd actually recommend avoiding the still-not-standardized features as you'll have less/no change when it lands in browsers.


I looked at the prospects of starting a React, Aurelia, or VueJS projects a few days ago and a year ago. Anyone who wants to wait to upgrade to these new things will be really happy to see how much nicer these things get every year. Tooling and starter kits just keep getting better, and best of all, you could probably wait a long time to switch and miss out on nothing important.


That's a good point, and one of the reasons I've been reluctant to use much ES6 until it's solidly baked into > 95% of the browsers / devices / etc. (delivery platforms? whichever descriptor) that I would need to support.

A transpiler just adds another layer of complexity that it's best to avoid as much as possible, in my opinion. It's not a perfect example, but if you've ever worked with CoffeeScript and run across a bug or unexpected side effect in the final rendered code . . . that should curb some of the transpiler enthusiasm.

Some of the ES6 features look handy enough, but I'd prefer waiting to see which ones shake out as actually useful over time, versus which are just momentary novelties.


> "20% of your customers" Depends on the product.

Regardless, you can easily transpile a codebase to support those browsers.

If you aren't doing that already, you probably should be. Otherwise you're supporting a codebase that is quickly going to become very dated and (in comparison to a more modern codebase) much messier.


Yeah but this is not the purpose of the article. The article suggest you don't need to and can use the feature right away. Otherwise it would mentions even mention await, async, yield, etc. and say you can use it too.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: