I've been dimly aware of the coming of "ES6", which I took to mean an updated kind of meta-javascript.
Down here at the coalface (perhaps a more apt metaphor is me walking along the railroad, picking up coal that fell off)...
I'm having a look at the shiny new[-ish, but already deprecated] "sw-toolbox", a *lieberry* that handles Googlian "service worker" cache API calls which are the replacement for never-really-quite-worked "application cache". The sw-toolbox API is in ES6. Yeah, it has those pointy (=>) things.
I can copy-and-paste with the best of them and that sort of works for a prototype build, but ES6 has piqued my curiosity. WTF is it, really?
My first line of inquiry: https://www.lewagon.com/blog/from-jquery-to-dom-and-es6
The premise is quite interesting: to paraphrase, ES6 is better, faster, stronger because it don't need no steenking lieberries (oh wait...).
Assuming this is valid in use-cases not involving service worker cache API calls, for which there are, indeed lieberries (and TFFT), and in the specific use-case of jquery-replacement, the first thing that strikes me is that, in this article's given examples, ES6 requires more custom code by character count. E.g.:
JQuery:
var lead = $('#lead')
ES6:
const lead = document.getElementById('lead')
This holds true for all given examples in the article, of which there are admittedly not very many, addressing the simplest functions.
Without the jquery upfront hit, well, yes that means less download and processing for vanilla ES6. Two things:
1. For virtually all, extant modern device hardware capabilities, the jquery 'hit' is trivial, and
2. If you using a *lot* of custom code, that apparent ES6 code bloat (vs. jquery) will add up, and fast.
Also, although the given ES6 examples aren't that difficult to parse side-by-side jquery equivalents, it is considerably less (than jquery) like (so-called) natural language, and more a shorthand-like, symbol-laden abstraction. Going in the wrong direction, then. Maybe ES6 will be easier for AI code generation. Maybe that's the whole point.
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