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You Should be Using esm

Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦 on September 16, 2018

tl;dr: You can use JavaScript modules in node today without transpiling, just npm -S esm and run your app with node -r esm foo.js. add "...

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Sergiu Mureşan • Sep 17 '18

Babel is also a very good way to scare beginners from using latest JS. Backwards compatibility is important but there isn't a need to include it in every single tutorial out there. Let people get a taste of new JS then introduce them to Babel, especially now when most up-to-date browsers support it.

Defiance Black • Sep 17 '18 • Edited

I can attest to this. My first dev foray was into JS and while I was impressed by the breadth of the ecosystem and the enthusiasm of its torch-bearers, I quickly came to find myself in a sea of chaos.

Sea of Chaos is my title for JS because something that has been around for so long should not be nearly so complicated... all to support versions of browsers that less than 5% of people use.

TypeScript looks nice... but Transcrypt has always looked better since embracing Python.

Sergiu Mureşan • Sep 18 '18

And I thought that CoffeeScript was the closest to Python. Good find!

Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦 • Sep 17 '18

Well put

Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦 • Sep 18 '18

A previous version of this post said that the "esm": "auto" package.json configuration is required for interop, which is incorrect. esm will let you load cjs in modules out of the box, you just need to install and load. The post has been edited.

Nicky Hajal • Sep 16 '18

Thanks for the detailed look into this! Dealing with imports is one of the few remaining annoying bits to deal with.

Elliot Derhay • Sep 17 '18

Not about the content, but tapping the ID links towards the top doesn't seem to work for me. My address bar updates, but nothing else happens.

Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦 • Sep 17 '18 • Edited

Thanks for the notes. I used GFM-style anchor links, maybe they don't work the same on dev.to.

issue for tracking

Markdown Headers Should Have IDs for Linking #682

bennypowers commented on Sep 17, 2018

Feature Request or Task

When users create headings in markdown, the headings should have ids added to enable linking throughout the document

[tl;dr](#tl-dr)
[The History](#the-history)
[Transpiling](#transpiling)
[The Problem](#the-problem)
[`esm`: A Better Solution](#esm-a-better-solution)
[Summary](#summary)

## tl;dr:
...

## The History
...

## Transpiling
...

## The Problem
...

### The Cost of Transpiling
...

### Principles and Cognitive Load
...

## `esm`: A Simple Solution
...

## Summary
...