Which JavaScript should be taught?
A few weeks ago I taught a class on front end development. At some point I had to face the question: which JavaScript do I focus on?
It wasn’t an easy one, but I ended up focusing the JavaScript lessons on the good old ES5. Here’s a bunch of reasons that convinced me:
the goal of the company is to port existing apps written in .NET to web technologies. It’s a already a huge switch. Let’s not complicate it.
Internet Explorer 11 has to be supported. Most of the new features in ES6 are not supported by IE 11.
ES6 would have required to introduce (and teach) a bunch of tools that are needed to transpile JS. There was no time and, as mentioned above, the company was already facing a huge shift, especially mindset-wise. More tools, more confusion.
I could have taught some of the frameworks on fashion nowadays, but I just presented jQuery, even if “it’s 2016 man, no one uses jQuery anymore”.
I focused the lessons on getting things done, with the smallest set of dependencies. jQuery is more than enough to make you go a long way.
Instead of talking about frameworks I preferred to include lessons on accessibility and security.
So now they have a solid base. On top of that they can build products in React, Ember, TypeScript or INSERT_FRAMEWORK_ANNOUNCED_TODAY_HERE. If something goes wrong they can still fall back to old, boring (but working) JavaScript.