JS.next: A Manager's Guide

Chapter 2. ES6 Goals

Why is so much happening now? JavaScript’s current development path reflects years of prior work.

History in the Making

After years of hard work, deep thought, and discussion, JavaScript was about to change in July 2008. Many brilliant minds spent years debating, and at times fighting over, what the next steps for JavaScript should be. They spent years watching the Web organically grow and evolve. That growth meant different things for many companies and individuals. These people and companies had unique and distinct opportunities, if they could only make a few changes of their own to JavaScript. These biases made life difficult for the TC39, the committee in charge of steering the ECMAScript specification. None of the people tasked with guiding ECMAScript (and, by proxy, JavaScript) could have predicted the challenges they would face as they attempted to accomplish their task.

As in many debates, all sides argued their honest opinions about what needed to be changed in order to further the progress of the language. Prior to July of 2008, many of these debates became heated, and very few saw much progress, if any. Due to these conflicts, the small group that initially endeavoured to fight for JavaScript inevitably broke down. Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, compared the history of the ECMAScript standardization committee to Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring, in the sense that a once strong group of friends ultimately divided into smaller groups, taking ...