ECMAScript 2016: New Version of JavaScript Language Released (softpedia.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Ecma International, the organization in charge of managing the ECMAScript standard, has published the most recent version of the JavaScript language. ECMAScript 2016 (ES7 or JavaScript 7th Edition in the old naming scheme) comes with very few new features. The most important is that JavaScript developers will finally get a "raise to the power" operator, which was mysteriously left out of the standard for 20 years. The operator is **...
It will also become much easier to search for data in a JavaScript array with Array.prototype.includes(), but support for async functions (initially announced for ES2016), has been deferred until next year's release. "From now on, expect smaller changelogs from the ECMAScript team," reports Softpedia, "since this was the plan set out last year. Fewer breaking changes means more time to migrate code, instead of having to rewrite entire applications, as developers did when the mammoth ES6 release came out last year."

Comments

Re:But JavaScript isn't a success.

[Zontar The Mindless]

Prototypes kick ass, if you know how to use them.

That is, if you're not one of the many who confuses the territory (objects) with just one of the maps (classes) you can make of that territory.

The real beauty of JS is that the notation for just about any data structure maps very neatly on to any of the others. If it's easier to work with an object at some point as a hash, you treat it as a hash. A few lines later, it proves handy to treat it as an array. Later, maybe it's best to access it as an object again.

Apparently, most folks can't handle that kind of freedom.