This is the context, then, in which ES6 was released. ES6—also called ECMAScript2015—is the most recent version of JavaScript. It changed some of the fundamental ways we use the language. It introduced a number of new features that the community had been calling for for years.

At first glance, the claim that ES6 will make JavaScript frameworks obsolete seems pretty absurd, because the changes made in ES6 were (at least according to some authors) little more than syntactical tweaks. Seeing the additions that were made as syntactical, however, misses the point.

That’s because most of the “extra functionality” that frameworks provide could be seen in the same way—a method of providing quick shortcuts to features of JavaScript via syntactic changes. Some of these syntactic shortcuts have become so familiar to us that we have come to see them as separate features, but they are nonetheless merely ways of automating existing elements of JavaScript.

That’s not to understate the utility of syntactic innovation. In fact, the majority of the new features in ES6 are essentially syntactic shortcuts. These include:

• Default parameters

• Template literals

• Multi-line strings

• Destructuring assignment

• Enhanced object literals

• Arrow functions

But the reason why these features help make frameworks more obsolete is because they bring functionality that has so far been limited to frameworks right into the core of JavaScript itself. This subsequently reduces the need for frameworks in most situations. More functions—including promises and block-scoped constructs—standardize things we were all using frameworks to do in an ad-hoc fashion. Developers who were previously working in different frameworks can now talk to each other for the first time in years. 

This is the context, then, in which ES6 was released. ES6—also called ECMAScript2015—is the most recent version of JavaScript. It changed some of the fundamental ways we use the language. It introduced a number of new features that the community had been calling for for years.

At first glance, the claim that ES6 will make JavaScript frameworks obsolete seems pretty absurd, because the changes made in ES6 were (at least according to some authors) little more than syntactical tweaks. Seeing the additions that were made as syntactical, however, misses the point.

That’s because most of the “extra functionality” that frameworks provide could be seen in the same way—a method of providing quick shortcuts to features of JavaScript via syntactic changes. Some of these syntactic shortcuts have become so familiar to us that we have come to see them as separate features, but they are nonetheless merely ways of automating existing elements of JavaScript.

That’s not to understate the utility of syntactic innovation. In fact, the majority of the new features in ES6 are essentially syntactic shortcuts. These include:

• Default parameters

• Template literals

• Multi-line strings

• Destructuring assignment

• Enhanced object literals

• Arrow functions

But the reason why these features help make frameworks more obsolete is because they bring functionality that has so far been limited to frameworks right into the core of JavaScript itself. This subsequently reduces the need for frameworks in most situations. More functions—including promises and block-scoped constructs—standardize things we were all using frameworks to do in an ad-hoc fashion. Developers who were previously working in different frameworks can now talk to each other for the first time in years.