ECMAScript

All right, we got some web platform news.

What's what's what's new in ECMAScript? There's been some developments.

Yeah, this is via Rob Palmer.

Maybe we need a Rob Palmer corner now or the ECMAScript corner.

But they just reported on the stage two of composites proposal.

Now, composites are similar to you know, the, it's an evolution of like the record and tuple proposals.

Yep.

That is a, uh, a, a fitness function library for the JavaScript/ECMAScript world.

Yep.

The old one was TS Arc, but, uh, as of I think just recently, that has been just kind of frozen, and, uh, Arc Unit adopted it to Arc Unit TS.

4.

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This is w- way back before web workers and stuff like that were a thing.

And then there was a threatened version of ECMAScript where they were going to add a whole bunch of things to the language all in one go.

Um, Dave Herman and some other folks were working on that for Brendan Eich, and, uh, they had a specification for how they were gonna do this in standard ML.

I'm like, "Eh, whatever this standard ML thing is, I can learn a little bit about that." And, uh, so then I said, "You know, I would like to run some of this JavaScript on the server side." I had had a decent experience using, uh, something called Apache Cocoon way back in the day, which was an old, like, XML-based web thing that had, uh, continuation passing s- or continuation-based JavaScript.

It is, and there's one frustration that I think a lot of your listeners will have, is that whenever something's going through a specification, it's so slow to actually get specified, right? Like when I started work, JavaScript was just a mess across the board, right? Between different browsers, and you needed to do all these different things, and you would figure it out through callback hell, and, like, you would go through it.

And then a lot of the ECMAScript standardization came in, and it was like, "Oh, this is really cool." Right? When we started working on this, and then they started creating test suites that you could run through everything.

But the slowness made it correct, right? Because if you make things fast, you cause other problems, and we've seen that in, like, the spec world.

So there was a, a specification, I c- I can't think of the name of it at the moment, which is used for people to send messages between browsers.

Without this, JavaScript would look for a standalone variable named a, which would cause an error or an unexpected result.

Since ECMAScript 2015 ES6, there is a shorter syntax for defining methods called the method shorthand.

It removes the colon and the function keyword.

const calculator equals a 10 b 5 add return this.a plus this.b semicolon.

Since then, there have been standards committees.

You know, ECMAScript came out and st- standardized the language, and then-

Yeah

... um, all the other browsers started to implement it as well.