ES2021 Is Here, and It’s Already Feels Like Old News
Hemanth HM has put together a compact overview of ES2021 features. It’s a stark reminder of how fast JavaScript evolves: ES2015 once dominated the conversation, and now it’s more than five years in the rearview mirror.
The new spec brings some handy conveniences, like the ability to drop underscores into numeric literals for readability. For instance, 1_000_000_000 is functionally identical to 1000000000 but far easier to parse at a glance. Beyond that, the list gets more esoteric, and honestly, some of it is tough to wrap your head around.
What’s striking is the philosophical contrast between JavaScript and a language like Go, which is often used by the same developers. Go deliberately sticks to a single for loop construct and resists syntactic sugar, whereas JavaScript embraces it — with four distinct loop variants just for arrays. Sugar, it seems, is a powerful addiction.
