Hungry Web Developer Podcast
Speed
Volume
In this episode we dive into the history of Javascript aka ECMAScript and its latest features since ES6.
JavaScript was created in 10 days by Brendan Eich in 1995. In the early days of the web, it was the wild west with companies adding features as they saw fit. Coming together rarely to agree on how the language should function. Eventually, this led to a long period of stagnation in the language that wasn't fixed until 2015 with the release of the ES6.
You probably have heard the word ECMAScript. ECMAScript is the specification against which JavaScript engines are implemented. By itself, ECMAScript defines a minimal API that each implementation needs to follow. Typically these are your basic programming language features such as loops, variable scope, etc. The rest of what is typically thought of as JavaScript are actually browser APIs which you can learn more about in this blog post
There is a committee in charge of guiding the development of ECMAScript called the TC39. That committee follows the following process when considering new JavaScript features.
Fun note: This process came about since the release of ES6 was massive! So rather than big monolithic releases, we now add small incremental features.
Download: javascript_features.mp3