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by chatmasta 3347 days ago
Forward adoption is one thing the JS ecosystem does well (probably due to the sheer necessity of it given the many varying platforms outside control of the developer). Transpiling supersets of the language to the lowest supportable denominator is such an elegant approach. Thanks to projects like babel, typescript, webpack, etc, you can write your code in the most modern language spec, but target platforms not yet supporting it.

I suspect this may be easier to achieve with JS than other languages because its prototypical nature makes it easy to compose dependencies. However, there is certainly a lot that other communities can learn from the JS community's solutions to this problem.
2 comments
orf 3347 days ago
> is such an elegant approach

In theory more than practice. For example if you use array destructuring (`[x, y] = something`) and Babel cannot verify that `something` is always an array it inserts a 664 character function that handles generators and other things. That adds performance and size overhead (grep for _slicedToArray in your compiled js files), when all you really want is `x = something[0]...`

https://babeljs.io/repl/#?babili=false&evaluate=true&lineWra...

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goatlover 3347 days ago
It's a solution to a problem that exists because browsers incrementally support different features of the language, instead of upgrading all at once. That and the older browsers in use when you want to maintain backwards compatibility.

The only reason the Python 2/3 issue exists is because of just enough breaking backwards compatibility in a way that a lot of people didn't agree with in the community. This isn't a thing in Ruby.

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