Let's Learn ES6

How did we get here?

How did we end up with ES6? A lot of things had to happen in order for ES6 to come around. For a long time, JavaScript was a fairly stagnant language. There were many years between new releases. Because of that, people seemed to get used to the quirks and nuances of the language, and as developers we made up for areas that JavaScript seemed to lack.

However people wanted new features and compile to JavaScript languages started to pop up. Languages like Coffeescript started to push features that would later influence features in ES6.

What happened to ES4?

You might have noticed, if you do a little digging, that there is no mention of an ES4 release. This is because it was completely abandoned (1), in 2007 Brendan Eich(JS creator) and Chris Wilson(Microsoft) could not come to an agreement around the features of the release. The proposed features would be a breaking change to many sites on the web. Because of this and many other issues the release was abandoned.

In 2008 however, progress started again, a new project called ECMAScript Harmony was created and it included many of the features we would have seen in ES4. There is a committee called TC39, Technical Committee 39, which drives the ECMAScript standard forward. This committee worked Harmony to create ES5, and it continues to work on each new version of the language.

Proposal Stages

In order for a feature to be added to the language it has to go through four stages. The stages consist of a strawman(the initial introduction), proposal, draft, candidate, and finally a finished product. Through out the stages the TC39 committee will be able to review the proposal, and anyone can review an in process proposal. To find out more check out the link in the additional resources section below (2).

What we will cover

In this course we will be covering quite a few features in the language. We will be looking at new syntax like generator functions and template literals, we can see how arrow functions can be used to our advantage. We will explore promises, and modules, we see how we can use them to make our code clean and readable. We will look at these features and much more!

The future is bright

JavaScript is one of the most popular languages in the world. It is being run just about everywhere, on servers and being used to control micro controllers. Platforms like Node.js are taking it to new places, now more than ever really learning JavaScript is going to be an important step in your career!

Special Thanks

A lot of people helped me get to this point in the project. Huge thanks to the people that have helped me with this course, Erin McPhee, Simon Bloom, Dustin Ruetz, and Nadia Rasul. With out their help this course would be an English students nightmare! And you know what, it still might be!

Additional resources

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