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I disagree. ES6 made JS much more palatable but it's still behind most modern languages in terms of number of features and in velocity of new features getting i

I disagree. ES6 made JS much more palatable but it's still behind most modern languages in terms of number of features and in velocity of new features getting introduced. Javascript has actually been extremely slow to get new features compared to other languages. Since ES6 (3 years ago), the only major, mainstream feature that has been added to JS has been async functions, which are awesome, but in that time Python (a language of similar age and global use) has gotten an optional type system, async/await, and _hundreds_ of standard library modules, classes, and functions. In my opinion, JS badly needs more functions in it's standard library, which should move through the proposal policy quickly. However, common sense standard library functions like flatMap have been in the pipeline for years are still not in the final stage. We may not get flatMap, import(), trimStart, or trimEnd in ES2019, they are all stalled in Stage 3. There's no good arguments not to have these in the standard library, but we still have to wait years. In addition to that, JS could really use some language features that make it's core paradigms, functional and object oriented, simpler, and have been in other languages for years. The pipeline operator would make functional programming much easier, and decorators would make object oriented programming easier. These are, in my opinion, common sense features since they are so well received in other langauges, but they get stalled out since they are seen as "bloating" the syntax, or making javascript "too opinionated on how to do something". Meanwhile, people are compiling full fledged functional languages (Reason, Elm, Purescript) to Javascript, because Javascript isn't keeping up with them on features. It could, but the TC39 review process is so slow that it's not worth waiting on. For those reasons, in my opinion, we should really be releasing new language features much quicker.

WorldMaker 8y ago
> In my opinion, JS badly needs more functions in it's standard library, which should move through the proposal policy quickly. However, common sense standard library functions like flatMap have been in the pipeline for years are still not in the final stage. We may not get flatMap, import(), trimStart, or trimEnd in ES2019, they are all stalled in Stage 3. There's no good arguments not to have these in the standard library, but we still have to wait years. This is one of the arguments for the pipeline operator, as well. Right now browsers are inherently quite afraid of adding things to Object.prototype, Array.prototype, etc, because doing so breaks things. There are too many ancient JS libraries that patch whatever they want into Object.prototype/Array.prototype, such as MooTools, that threaten to break if the prototypes themselves change from what is expected. This is how flatMap() got stuck into "SmooshGate" and the intentionally absurd proposal that it should be named smooshMap(), because if Browsers add Array.prototype.flatMap it does break versions of MooTools still out in the wild. The pipeline operator is one option (among several proposed options) to move the standard library forward without compromising backward compatibility. Maybe we can't have nice things like `myArray.flatMap()` because it breaks backwards compatibility, but maybe something like `myArray|>flatMap()` is an acceptable compromise.
hajile 8y ago
> I disagree. ES6 made JS much more palatable but it's still behind most modern languages in terms of number of features and in velocity of new features getting introduced. Javascript has actually been extremely slow to get new features compared to other languages. JS has been adding features at a tremendous rate. Several major features land every year. Adding something like async generators is a huge change that affects large parts of the language. If the Go, Ruby, or Python guys want to add a feature, they just code up a proposal and add it if the maintainers like it. JS has 4 major implementations and a dozen or so other reasonably popular implementations. Adding a feature in a way that works with all of them (without breaking 25 years worth of applications) is hard. Reason, Elm, and Purescript are not good comparisons. The features they add (especially the type system) aren't likely to ever be JS features (if they are even possible in the language).
- coltonv 8y ago
  You say "Several major features land every year.", but you don't back that up. In 2018 the major features we got object rest/spread and asynchronous interation. Rest/spread is a big feature that I forgot to mention, but async iteration is only useful in a few situations, I'd call it a minor feature. In 2017 we got async/await, and shared memory/atomics. Only a few fringe code bases will use shared/memory/atomics, so I'd call async/await the only major feature. In 2016 we got 0 major features. The only things in the entire spec (an entire year of language progress) was Array.includes and an exponent operator (). Both of those are very clearly "minor" features. So in the last 3 years, I'd say we've had 2 or 3 major, mainstream features, that's very far from "several major features every year". Especially 2016 where there were 0 major features.
  - hajile 8y ago
    In 2016, browsers were still working on implementing es2015 (I'm still waiting for proper tail calls on non-Safari engines). Atomics is a huge feature (especially in the amount of work required). getOwnPropertyDescriptors is also a big addition. Async iteration is a very big deal that can potentially affect things like reading files in node. Object spread seems big, but is actually far more simple as it is a syntactic special case of Object.assign(). In contrast, the far reaching repercussions of adding async iteration and the implementation are both large things. Given the level of optimization for JS regex, adding a bunch of new features there is also a big job. Promise finally is also a big update (though combining map and flatmap in promises automatically is the biggest issue with them). This year, there's integers, working imports, and big class upgrades in the works. The list of major proposals is rapidly shrinking. Is there another major language adding that many big features in the past three years? Keep in mind that most stage 3 proposals already have at least one implementation already done.
icholy 8y ago
Velocity of new features being added is not a metric of quality.

WorldMaker 8y ago

> In my opinion, JS badly needs more functions in it's standard library, which should move through the proposal policy quickly. However, common sense standard library functions like flatMap have been in the pipeline for years are still not in the final stage. We may not get flatMap, import(), trimStart, or trimEnd in ES2019, they are all stalled in Stage 3. There's no good arguments not to have these in the standard library, but we still have to wait years. This is one of the arguments for the pipeline operator, as well. Right now browsers are inherently quite afraid of adding things to Object.prototype, Array.prototype, etc, because doing so breaks things. There are too many ancient JS libraries that patch whatever they want into Object.prototype/Array.prototype, such as MooTools, that threaten to break if the prototypes themselves change from what is expected. This is how flatMap() got stuck into "SmooshGate" and the intentionally absurd proposal that it should be named smooshMap(), because if Browsers add Array.prototype.flatMap it does break versions of MooTools still out in the wild. The pipeline operator is one option (among several proposed options) to move the standard library forward without compromising backward compatibility. Maybe we can't have nice things like `myArray.flatMap()` because it breaks backwards compatibility, but maybe something like `myArray|>flatMap()` is an acceptable compromise.

hajile 8y ago

> I disagree. ES6 made JS much more palatable but it's still behind most modern languages in terms of number of features and in velocity of new features getting introduced. Javascript has actually been extremely slow to get new features compared to other languages. JS has been adding features at a tremendous rate. Several major features land every year. Adding something like async generators is a huge change that affects large parts of the language. If the Go, Ruby, or Python guys want to add a feature, they just code up a proposal and add it if the maintainers like it. JS has 4 major implementations and a dozen or so other reasonably popular implementations. Adding a feature in a way that works with all of them (without breaking 25 years worth of applications) is hard. Reason, Elm, and Purescript are not good comparisons. The features they add (especially the type system) aren't likely to ever be JS features (if they are even possible in the language).

coltonv 8y ago
You say "Several major features land every year.", but you don't back that up. In 2018 the major features we got object rest/spread and asynchronous interation. Rest/spread is a big feature that I forgot to mention, but async iteration is only useful in a few situations, I'd call it a minor feature. In 2017 we got async/await, and shared memory/atomics. Only a few fringe code bases will use shared/memory/atomics, so I'd call async/await the only major feature. In 2016 we got 0 major features. The only things in the entire spec (an entire year of language progress) was Array.includes and an exponent operator (). Both of those are very clearly "minor" features. So in the last 3 years, I'd say we've had 2 or 3 major, mainstream features, that's very far from "several major features every year". Especially 2016 where there were 0 major features.
- hajile 8y ago
  In 2016, browsers were still working on implementing es2015 (I'm still waiting for proper tail calls on non-Safari engines). Atomics is a huge feature (especially in the amount of work required). getOwnPropertyDescriptors is also a big addition. Async iteration is a very big deal that can potentially affect things like reading files in node. Object spread seems big, but is actually far more simple as it is a syntactic special case of Object.assign(). In contrast, the far reaching repercussions of adding async iteration and the implementation are both large things. Given the level of optimization for JS regex, adding a bunch of new features there is also a big job. Promise finally is also a big update (though combining map and flatmap in promises automatically is the biggest issue with them). This year, there's integers, working imports, and big class upgrades in the works. The list of major proposals is rapidly shrinking. Is there another major language adding that many big features in the past three years? Keep in mind that most stage 3 proposals already have at least one implementation already done.

icholy 8y ago

Velocity of new features being added is not a metric of quality.