JavaScript or EcmaScript

I’ve just started looking for a new Job and after a few calls from the Agencies, there’s one question which I’m finding hard to answer.

How many years of JavaScript experience do you have?

I think the question should really be.

How long have you been using EcmaScript and which versions?

So whilst I have been using JavaScript for 17 years and I could just say that, in reality it’s changed a lot in that time and then for much of that time it wasn’t something I was using full time.

For years I was using Actionscript 3, you might know that it’s an ES4 language, which counter-intuitively has much more in common with ES6 aka ES2015 aka Harmony, Typescript and Google Dart than it does with ES5!

But how could ES4 have those features if they weren’t in ES5? Well ES4 was ambitious it added Classes and more to JavaScript and it got bogged down politically. In 2007 it was abandoned and the standards committee went for a less radical update, however, Adobe had the freedom to add whatever they liked to their own VM in the Flash Player and they went ahead, it’s only relatively recently that it’s features are appearing in the browsers thanks to ES6 and Babel.

And then just to confuse the agencies, even more, there’s TypeScript, which some refer to as ES2016+ or ES+! But try explaining that to a recruiter and most would just glaze over.

This article explains what happened to ES4.
EcmaScript 4 was too far ahead of its time

Brendan Eich’s feelings about the abandonment of ES4, worth reading the comments if you’re curious about why it happened, but a lot of suspicion around it being a political move by Microsoft to hold the web back.
https://brendaneich.com/2007/11/es4-news-and-opinion/

This shows where ES4 fits in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript

And if you’ve never seen AS3 then here’s a link so you can see how similar it is to ES6.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript#ActionScript_3.0

John Papa’s thoughts on whether Typescript should be referred to as  ES+
https://johnpapa.net/es5-es2015-typescript/