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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."
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."
Trump supporters, Brexit leavers, Javascript developers, PHP programmers... They are all large in numbers.
Haskell sucks for one very important reason: it's obtuse.
Want to know why PHP kicked Perl's ass 15 years ago? Because self-important idiots thought it was a great idea to write code that looked like line noise, and praised each other on how clever they were. PHP, in contrast, was, and is, extremely user-friendly. It goes out of its way to make the tasks for which it was designed as painless as possible.
Perl catered to pompous, yet laughably incompetent, basement dwellers who thought their write-once code was a sign that they were geniuses. PHP catered to developers who wanted to get things accomplished. PHP won, and rightly so.
Programming languages are designed for people, to make writing programs easier. Any language that makes programming difficult is a massive failure of a language. That's Haskell in a nutshell. It doesn't matter what technical argument you want to make as it's completely irrelevant.
As this article is about Javascript, I'd like to point out that it's incredibly successful in that regard. It brought formerly advanced programming concepts to the masses in a way that's simple to understand and almost idiomatic to use. It's the best of both worlds.
You want a language like Haskell to go mainstream? Cut the obtuse syntax and other finicky bullshit and build a language that's accessible.
Oh, and stay well-clear of that classical OO obsession we see infecting so many languages these days. That junk failed ages ago. All that fad gave us was dramatically larger code bases and massively increased complexity. Javascript didn't get all of it right, but the prototypal approach it uses is superior in just about every possible way to the shit we see in Java, C#, Python, etc.
Brendan had the right ideas and something very good was built up around it. Brendan was fast, correct and he f* built the right future-vision forward-looking tech at a very confusing time.
A genius derives a better hubble-constant with a pocket-calculator in 30 seconds rather than relying on measurements done over years and years, requiring endless staff and hardware and costing billions.
But I hear you say that genius is not to be trusted as plodding normals will always produce better because 'oh look how hard they worked'. Then you profile your self by misrepresenting and critiquing someone and the history around his work. Someone that has out-impacted you by magnitudes.