6SYMBOLS AND SYMBOL PROPERTIES
ECMAScript 6 introduces symbols as a primitive type. (The language already had five primitive types: strings, numbers, Booleans, null, and undefined.) Symbols began as a way to create private object members, a feature JavaScript developers wanted for a long time. Before symbols, any property with a string name was easy to access regardless of the obscurity of the name, and the private names feature was meant to let developers create non-string property names. That way, normal techniques for detecting these private names wouldn’t work.
The private names proposal eventually evolved into ECMAScript 6 symbols, and this ...
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