Exploring modern JavaScript

When we speak of modern JavaScript, this refers to ECMAScript 2015 (which also is known as ES6) or newer. It contains a lot of useful features, which are not included in older JavaScript versions. Since 2015 there has been an update to the specification released every year.

You can have a look at the features that were implemented in previous releases in the TC39 GitHub repository (https://bit.ly/prn-js-proposals). You can also find a lot of information about upcoming features and release plans there.

Let’s start our journey to understand the most important parts of JavaScript by having a look under the hood. To truly understand modern JavaScript and the tooling around it, we have to take a little look at the basics and the history of the language. JavaScript is a script language, which can run nearly everywhere.

The most common use case clearly is building dynamic frontends for the web browser, but it also runs on the server (Node.js), as...