Comment by hajile | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hajile | Hacker News Reader

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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 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).

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.

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.

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