Update 2017-01-29: At the TC39 meeting in January 2017, the last feature of ECMAScript 2017, “Shared memory and atomics” advanced to stage 4. That means that its feature set is now complete, as listed below.

Array.prototype.includes is an ECMAScript proposal by Domenic Denicola and Rick Waldron. It is at stage 4 (finished) and part of ECMAScript 2016.

Async functions are an ECMAScript proposal by Brian Terlson. It is at stage 3 (candidate).

Before I can explain async functions, I need to explain how Promises and generators can be combined to perform asynchronous operations via synchronous-looking code.

The exponentiation operator (**) is an ECMAScript proposal by Rick Waldron. It is at stage 4 (finished) and part of ECMAScript 2016.

We always knew that ECMAScript 2016 (ES2016) would be a small release. It turns out that it will be very small. Read on for a list of its features and an explanation why that is not a problem.

Today, Johannes Weber and I are launching a new weekly email newsletter: ES.next News.

In this blog post, I present enumify, a library for implementing enums in JavaScript. The approach it takes is inspired by Java’s enums.

This blog post explains that classes have lexical inner names, just like named function expressions.

One nice npm feature is that you can install packages with executables locally. This blog post explains how to run locally installed executables.

This blog post explains four approaches for managing private data for ES6 classes:

1. Keeping private data in the environment of a class constructor
2. Marking private properties via a naming convention (e.g. a prefixed underscore)
3. Keeping private data in WeakMaps
4. Using symbols as keys for private properties