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I really wish we would stop calling it ES6. Browser vendors should be especially careful to call ES2015 by its correct name and help stop perpetuating the confu
by vmasto 9y ago
I really wish we would stop calling it ES6. Browser vendors should be especially careful to call ES2015 by its correct name and help stop perpetuating the confusion (ES6, ES7, ES2016, ES2017, you can see how this quickly gets confusing).
- ergothus 9y agoES6 is 3 syllables. ES2015 is 6 or 7 (depending if you say "twenty fifteen" or "two thousand fifteen"). I'm a dev. I'm lazy. I have no particular objection to the idea of moving away from ES6 as a name, but if the new name isn't more useful, it's not going to gain any ground.
- avaer 9y agoBut the new name is more useful. It tells you how many years you're behind.
- ergothus 9y agoOnly sort of - it says how far behind the standard I might be, but since we're limited (on the Web at least) to what the browsers have implemented, it's not really measuring the important parts. (And in the backend, we're limited to what Node or other server-side engines support, and generally that goes back to the browser support). ES2015/ES6 might be 2 years ago, but feature complete support isn't yet available on all major browsers. I expect, however, that ES2016 will hit complete-or-basically-complete support relatively soon after full ES2015 support. If true (or any other irregularity over time), I might be 2 years behind on ES2015 and 1 year behind on ES2016 according to their names, but I might have, say 3 months until ES2015 is an option and 8 months for ES2016. And of course, unlike, say, Java, it's not really a yes/no choice. I tend to use const/let, native promises, fetch(), and arrow functions, but haven't yet had/found/realized a need for generators...am I behind ES2015? If 30% of ES2016 is implemented by most browsers, and I use one feature included in that 30% in 2017, am I 1 year behind? The ES6, ES7, etc labels do an equal job (that is, not a great one) of saying how behind you are, in a more compact package.
- vmasto 9y agoUnfortunately it's the name we're stuck with though, and it makes a lot more sense because ECMA releases are yearly. Not judging, but if high profile articles and browser vendors started addressing it correctly we wouldnt have any issues migrating, more syllables or not.
- ergothus 9y agoI'm a touch confused...are you saying that if everyone used the year-based nomenclature, the inconsistent support would go away? Today in 2017 I have some ES6/ES2015 features I can use as well as some ES7/ES2016 features, but there are also other ES6/ES2015 that I can't count on being supported, and quite a few ES7/ES2016 features I can't count on. How are these problems alleviated if we change the name we use? Or have I totally misunderstood your point? Side Note: I'm not a fan of using a year for the same reason we (i.e. most everyone) stopped using it for versioning - That previous iterations have been done on a yearly cycle does not mean that future iterations will follow that schedule. That, however, is a side argument that neither of us touched on.
- vmasto 9y agoJust talking about the name. You can see how this is confusing, here's a recent one just from today by Craig Federighi https://twitter.com/feross/status/871839072590979076 https://twitter.com/feross/status/871839072590979076
- int_19h 9y agoI'm pretty sure this ship has sailed for ES6. It's been referred as such while it was in development for so long, it's here to stay. The next one might be different. But they really need to come up with a better than than "2017" or whatever. There's no similar problem with C or C++, and that's likely because they use 2 digit years, not 4 digit - C++17 isn't super short, but it's not a mouthful.
- fooey 9y agowe should compromise and call it ES15, it's the "twenty" in the middle that makes it so awkward
- jrochkind1 9y agoI don't care what the name is, but if everyone would just use the SAME name, it'd be a hell of a lot less confusing. But hey, this is Apple which often insists on giving their OS releases both a number and a name and referring to them by each in different places (but hardly ever using both name and number at once), so. I feel like if I were able to tally up all the minutes I've spent cross-referencing "Wait, so 10.6, which one is that? Wait, so 'Leopard', which one is that?", it'd be depressing.
- drdaeman 9y agoWhy not just call it ES'15 when spoken, and write as ES2015? Just like we do with years. "Fifteen" isn't much worse than "seven" and this won't be an issue until for another 80 years.
- rspeer 9y agoBecause that's yet a third set of numbers referring to the versions, adding to the confusion, especially because it sounds kind of like the series of numbers it definitely isn't. When you speak it, nobody can hear the apostrophe.
- douche 9y agoIf only we could scrap the whole ecmascript thing and force everyone to implement a language that wasn't fundamentally broken for anything more complicated than slapping event handlers on buttons.
- om2 9y agoWe'll probably use years for the future versions. ES6/ES2015 was a much bigger change than we're expecting from the next few versions so it seemed like a good point to make the break.