JavaScript of the future

It was not so long ago that somebody asked me whether we should really use the bind function of ECMAScript 5.1, as then we'd probably run into browser compatibility issues. The web moves very fast, and we need to keep up the pace. We can't write code that does not use the latest features, even if this would cause issues in old browsers.

The fantastic people from TC39, the technical committee that is responsible for writing the ECMAScript specification, have done a great job progressively enhancing the JavaScript language. This, and the fact that JavaScript is so flexible, allows us to use so-called polyfills and shims to make our code run in older browsers.

ECMAScript 6 (also referred to as ECMAScript 2015) was published in June 2015, exactly four years after its predecessor. There is a massive amount of new API additions as well as a whole bunch of new language features. The language features are syntactic sugar, and ECMAScript 6 can be transpiled to its previous version where it runs perfectly in older browsers. At the time of writing this book, none of the current browser versions have fully implemented ECMAScript 6, but there's absolutely no reason not to use it for production applications.