ECMAScript 6 Is Officially a JavaScript Standard

rjmarvin writes: The ECMAScript 6 specification is now a standard. ES6 is the first major revision to the programming language since 1999 and its hallmark features include a revamped syntax featuring classes and modules. The Ecma General Assembly officially approved the specification at its June meeting in France, ECMAScript project editor Allen Wirfs-Brock announced.

Comments

What's in Javascript 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good overview here: http://es6-features.org

The big one is real classes. No more prototype boilerplate.

Spec

[TFlan91]

Since actually having a link to the spec in the announcement of the spec would be helpful...

http://www.ecma-international....

Re:Yay!

[ShanghaiBill]

What kind of features were worthless?

Semicolon insertion.
Idiotic scoping rules.
Bad handling of NaN and null.
Hidden prototype items in arrays/objects.
"with" statement.
"==" not working like "===".
"void"

Many more listed here: Bad parts
And here: Awful parts

Prototypical

[nmb3000]

revamped syntax featuring classes

So they just gave up on the whole prototype system and duct taped class-based OO on top of it? That's actually kind of sad -- It was a special aspect of Javascript that set it apart from other languages, and homogenization is boring. I guess maybe today's "Javascript developers" just couldn't wrap their heads around it.

Here's a rundown of the new features if anyone else hasn't been following ES6 and is curious. A few of note are

scoped and const declaration via let and const,
lazy iterators and generators,
format/heredoc strings,
and varargs ala Lua.

Overall this looks like a good step in bringing Javascript closer to being on par with more modern languages.