Rpg Maker Developers Group

Well, here let's try to make a discussion about using preprocessors of javascript, because people hate/love features, etc, etc.

This is my personal opinion, hope you all contribute to this too.

If you can, please, avoid using any type of proceprocessor, why? the reason is quite simple:

you won't have to precompile and as a bonus, you won't have any possibility of messy code in your scripts.

Using a preprocessor, may have many, many advantages, cleaner code, evaluate if as expresions, return the last statement, etc. but many of them, I think, are counter productive, and they have bigger disadvantages compared to the small advantages.

The second option for me, is traceur, or any ES6 -> ES5 preprocessor, they are the best candidates to write clean code (because most of the ES6 features are just sugar, and some modules are already supported on many browsers), but if you are not using promises or things like that (Do you know what a promise in javascript is?) just using sugar for classes and arrow functions are really an overkill.

If you are planning to share your code, using a preprocessor is also a bad thing, imagine than other people will have to learn another language just for edit you, and imagine if everybody uses its own preprocessor...

"But there aren't many" you say ? ohhh,you are wrong.

Note: Using libraries like jQuery and Underscore should be out of here, they are related but not part of this topic.