ECMAScript 2015 Specification Approved

The General Assembly of Ecma International has announced the ratification of the ECMA-262 standard version 6, which is the ECMAScript 6 (ES6) language specification, which is also called ECMAScript 2015.

JavaScript was created by Brandon Eyck in 1995 in just 10 days, but it took the language as much as 20 years to absorb the possibilities of programming languages ​​that are popular today. JavaScript was not the best programming language, but the concept of a browser language was a promising idea. JavaScript began to pay attention almost immediately after its creation and was sent for standardization in 1996. The language releases:

• JavaScript 1.0 (1997)
• JavaScript 2.0 (1998) - with some changes to the previous version
• JavaScript 3.0 (1999) - with some new features

Then for several years nobody paid attention to JavaScript before AJAX appeared - a pretty good solution for browser applications. Since the Ecma collection, the community and browsers for a long time could not agree on the future path of language development, work on it continued only in 2008; when the commission TC39, controlling the development of JavaScript, came to a unanimous opinion and decided to start a small step forward: in 2009, ECMAScript 5 (ES5) appeared, and later a larger release, ES6, the specification of which was approved today! See page standard .
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The official name of the latest version of JavaScript is ECMAScript 2015, and the Ecma collection plans to release new versions more often. The release of the next version of ECMAScript 2016 is scheduled for next year. From this point on, the version name will include the year in which the release was made.

ES6 is a huge step forward after ES5, the specification of the new version of the language consists of 600 pages, its predecessor is only from 245. In ES6, JavaScript-developers who added very useful pieces, such as modules and classes, were added; as well as many utilities, such as: Maps, Sets, Promises and Generators. Although this is a very large release, ES6 has full backward compatibility. The Commission decided not to break the Internet due to incompatible versions, so all the old code will work, and the transition to the new one will be quite smooth. This means that some ES5 problems that developers have been complaining about over the years will not go anywhere either.

At the moment, not a single JavaScript client has full support for ES6, however, developers who really want to start writing on ES6 can compile it back to ES5 today. In order to fully implement all the features of the standard, browsers will take some time (maybe more than a year). For a more complete table of customer support for the standard, we recommend looking here .

Work has already begun on ECMAScript 2016 and asynchronous functions, typed objects, concurrency, class decorators and observers have already been proposed. Despite the fact that the possibility of introducing these features is being actively discussed by the commission, we cannot accurately predict their future. Some features can enter in the following specification, some in the following, and some may never enter. This document shows the phases of introducing features into a language.

The development of JavaScript was very slow at the beginning, but has accelerated incredibly lately. JavaScript is not going anywhere, and we hope that the standardization commissions and meetings will lead the language to where the community wants to see it.

As a supplement, we recommend reading the Exploring ES6: book article describing the book (following the link - an article describing the book), describing in detail all the new features of JavaScript.

This is a quick translation of this article , which is already half a day hanging in the top / r / javascript , I just came back from work and thought that I need to make a translation for with the Habrasoobschestva. This is my first, and I repeat once again, a quick translation, so please write about any errors with personal messages - we will correct them together.

UPD. Briefly about the release we already told monolithed - http://habrahabr.ru/post/260561/