-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Historical Timeline (Languages)
Lambda calculus (also written as λ-calculus) is a formal system in mathematical logic for expressing computation based on function abstraction and application using variable binding and substitution. It is a universal model of computation that can be used to simulate any Turing machine. The lambda calculus emerged in Alonzo Church's 1936 paper showing the unsolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem.
Lisp is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common use. Only Fortran is older, by one year. Lisp has changed since its early days, and many dialects have existed over its history. Today, the best-known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket and Clojure.
Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by (though not originally derived from) the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became a favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, the self-hosting compiler, and the read–eval–print loop.
The situation calculus is a logic formalism designed for representing and reasoning about dynamical domains. It was first introduced by John McCarthy in 1963.
POP-1 was developed by Robin Popplestone in 1968 and was originally named COWSEL. It was based on an RPN form of Lisp combined with some ideas from CPL.
POP-2 (also referred to as POP2) is a programming language developed by Robin Popplestone and Rod Burstall at the University of Edinburgh around 1970 from the earlier language POP-1. It drew roots from many sources: the languages Lisp and ALGOL 60, and theoretical ideas from Peter J. Landin. It used an incremental compiler, which gave it some of the flexibility of an interpreted language, including allowing new function definitions at runtime and modification of function definitions while a program was running (both of which are features of dynamic compilation), without the overhead of an interpreted language.
The Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver, known by its acronym STRIPS, is an automated planner developed by Richard Fikes and Nils Nilsson in 1971 at SRI International.
C is a general-purpose computer programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie, and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems, device drivers, protocol stacks, though decreasingly for application software. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems.
Prolog is a logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily as a declarative programming language: the program logic is expressed in terms of relations, represented as facts and rules. A computation is initiated by running a query over these relations.
The language was developed and implemented in Marseille, France, in 1972 by Alain Colmerauer with Philippe Roussel, based on Robert Kowalski's procedural interpretation of Horn clauses at University of Edinburgh.
In 1979, Bjarne Stroustrup, a Danish computer scientist, began work on "C with Classes", the predecessor to C++. The motivation for creating a new language originated from Stroustrup's experience in programming for his PhD thesis. Stroustrup found that Simula had features that were very helpful for large software development, but the language was too slow for practical use, while BCPL was fast but too low-level to be suitable for large software development. When Stroustrup started working in AT&T Bell Labs, he had the problem of analyzing the UNIX kernel with respect to distributed computing. Remembering his PhD experience, Stroustrup set out to enhance the C language with Simula-like features. C was chosen because it was general-purpose, fast, portable and widely used. As well as C and Simula's influences, other languages also influenced this new language, including ALGOL 68, Ada, CLU and ML.
In 1982, Bjorne Stroustrup started to develop a successor to C with Classes, which he named "C++" (++ being the increment operator in C) after going through several other names. New features were added, including virtual functions, function name and operator overloading, references, constants, type-safe free-store memory allocation (new/delete), improved type checking, and BCPL style single-line comments with two forward slashes (//). Furthermore, Stroustrup developed a new, standalone compiler for C++, Cfront.
Interval Calculus, the first widely used formalization of temporal events, is invented by James F. Allen.
In 1985, the first edition of The C++ Programming Language was released, which became the definitive reference for the language, as there was not yet an official standard. The first commercial implementation of C++ was released in October of the same year.
The event calculus is a logical language for representing and reasoning about events and their effects first presented by Robert Kowalski and Marek Sergot in 1986. It was extended by Murray Shanahan and Rob Miller in the 1990s. Similar to other languages for reasoning about change, the event calculus represents the effects of actions on fluents. However, events can also be external to the system. In the event calculus, one can specify the value of fluents at some given time points, the events that take place at given time points, and their effects.
In artificial intelligence, action description language (ADL) is an automated planning and scheduling system in particular for robots. It is considered an advancement of STRIPS. Edwin Pednault proposed this language in 1987. It is an example of an action language.
In 1989, C++ 2.0 was released. New features in 2.0 included multiple inheritance, abstract classes, static member functions, const member functions, and protected members.
In 1990, The Annotated C++ Reference Manual was published. This work became the basis for the future standard in 1998. Later feature additions included templates, exceptions, namespaces, new casts, and a Boolean type.
Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers write once, run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need to recompile. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of the underlying computer architecture. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++, but has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. The Java runtime provides dynamic capabilities (such as reflection and runtime code modification) that are typically not available in traditional compiled languages. As of 2019, Java was one of the most popular programming languages in use according to GitHub, particularly for client–server web applications, with a reported 9 million developers.
Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. It was released in May 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform.
JavaScript, often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, often incorporating third-party libraries. All major web browsers have a dedicated JavaScript engine to execute the code on users' devices.
JavaScript is a high-level, often just-in-time compiled language that conforms to the ECMAScript standard. It has dynamic typing, prototype-based object-orientation, and first-class functions. It is multi-paradigm, supporting event-driven, functional, and imperative programming styles. It has application programming interfaces (APIs) for working with text, dates, regular expressions, standard data structures, and the Document Object Model (DOM).
JavaScript engines were originally used only in web browsers, but are now core components of some servers and a variety of applications. The most popular runtime system for this usage is Node.js.
ECMAScript (/ˈɛkməskrɪpt/; ES) is a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different browsers. It is standardized by Ecma International in the document ECMA-262.
ECMAScript is commonly used for client-side scripting on the World Wide Web, and it is increasingly being used for writing server-side applications and services using Node.js and other runtime environments.
Ontology Inference Layer originated in Europe starting in 1997. OIL was developed by Dieter Fensel, Frank van Harmelen (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) and Ian Horrocks (University of Manchester) as part of the IST OntoKnowledge project.
The C++ programming language was initially standardized in 1998 as ISO/IEC 14882:1998, which was then amended by the C++03, C++11, C++14, and C++17 standards. The current C++20 standard supersedes these with new features and an enlarged standard library. Before the initial standardization in 1998, C++ was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs since 1979 as an extension of the C language. He wanted an efficient and flexible language similar to C that also provided high-level features for program organization. Since 2012, C++ has been on a three-year release schedule with C++23 as the next planned standard.
Editorial changes keep the specification fully aligned with ISO/IEC 16262 international standard.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications —all of them free open standards — define XML.
The Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) is an attempt to standardize Artificial Intelligence (AI) planning languages. It was first developed by Drew McDermott and his colleagues in 1998 (inspired by STRIPS and ADL among others) mainly to make the 1998/2000 International Planning Competition (IPC) possible, and then evolved with each competition. The standardization provided by PDDL has the benefit of making research more reusable and easily comparable, though at the cost of some expressive power, compared to domain-specific systems.
Added regular expressions, better string handling, new control statements, try/catch exception handling, tighter definition of errors, formatting for numeric output, and other enhancements.
The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) was the name of a US funding program at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started in 1999 by then Program Manager James Hendler, and later run by Murray Burke, Mark Greaves, and Michael Pagels. The program focused on the creation of machine-readable representations for the Web.
One of the Investigators working on the program was Tim Berners-Lee. Working with the program managers and other participants, Tim helped shape the effort to create technologies and demonstrations for what is now called the Semantic Web, leading in turn to the growth of knowledge graph technology.
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats with Turtle (Terse RDF Triple Language) currently being the most widely used notation.
RDF is a directed graph composed of triple statements. An RDF graph statement is represented by: 1) a node for the subject, 2) an arc that goes from a subject to an object for the predicate, and 3) a node for the object. Each of the three parts of the statement can be identified by a URI. An object can also be a literal value. This simple, flexible data model has a lot of expressive power to represent complex situations, relationships, and other things of interest, while also being appropriately abstract.
RDF was adopted as a W3C recommendation in 1999. The RDF 1.0 specification was published in 2004, the RDF 1.1 specification in 2014. SPARQL is a standard query language for RDF graphs. RDFS, OWL and SHACL are ontology languages that are used to describe RDF data.
The Web Services Description Language (WSDL /ˈwɪz dəl/) is an XML-based interface description language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a web service. The acronym is also used for any specific WSDL description of a web service (also referred to as a WSDL file), which provides a machine-readable description of how the service can be called, what parameters it expects, and what data structures it returns. Therefore, its purpose is roughly similar to that of a type signature in a programming language.
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON, pronounced /ˈdʒeɪsən/; also /ˈdʒeɪˌsɒn/) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other serializable values). It is a common data format with diverse uses in electronic data interchange, including that of web applications with servers.
JSON is a language-independent data format. It was derived from JavaScript, but many modern programming languages include code to generate and parse JSON-format data. JSON filenames use the extension .json. Any valid JSON file is a valid JavaScript (.js) file, even though it makes no changes to a web page on its own.
Douglas Crockford originally specified the JSON format in the early 2000s. He and Chip Morningstar sent the first JSON message in April 2001.
The Web Services Description Language (WSDL /ˈwɪz dəl/) is an XML-based interface description language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a web service. The acronym is also used for any specific WSDL description of a web service (also referred to as a WSDL file), which provides a machine-readable description of how the service can be called, what parameters it expects, and what data structures it returns. Therefore, its purpose is roughly similar to that of a type signature in a programming language.
Web Services Flow Language 1.0 (WSFL) was an XML programming language proposed by IBM in 2001 for describing Web services compositions. Language considered two types of compositions. The first type was for describing business processes as a collection of web services and the second was for describing interactions between partners. WSFL was proposed to be layered on top of Web Services Description Language.
"XLANG is a notation for the automation of business processes based on Web Services for the specification of message exchange behavior among participating Web Services. XLANG is expected to serve as the basis for automated protocol engines that can track the state of process instances and help enforce protocol correctness in message flows."
The 2002 submission of the DAML+OIL language to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) captures the work done by DAML contractors and the EU/U.S. ad hoc Joint Committee on Agent Markup Languages. This submission was the starting point for the language (later called OWL) to be developed by W3C's web ontology working group, WebOnt.
DAML+OIL was a syntax, layered on RDF and XML, that could be used to describe sets of facts making up an ontology.
DAML+OIL had its roots in three main languages - DAML, OIL, and SHOE, an earlier US research project.
New Domain Definition Language (NDDL) is NASA's response to PDDL from around 2002. Its representation differs from PDDL in several respects: 1) it uses a variable/value representation (timelines/activities) rather than a propositional/first-order logic, and 2) there is no concept of states or actions, only of intervals (activities) and constraints between those activities. In this respect, models in NDDL look more like schemas for SAT encodings of planning problems rather than PDDL models. Because of the mentioned differences planning and execution of plans (e.g. during critical space missions) may be more robust when using NDDL, but the correspondence to standard planning-problem representations other than PDDL may be much less intuitive than in case of PDDL.
This extension of PDDL 2.1 from around 2002–2006 provides a more flexible model of continuous change through the use of autonomous processes and events. The key this extension provides is the ability to model the interaction between the agent's behaviour and changes that are initiated by the agent's environment. Processes run over time and have a continuous effect on numeric values. They are initiated and terminated either by the direct action of the agent or by events triggered in the environment. This 3-part structure is referred to as the start-process-stop model. Distinctions are made between logical and numeric states: transitions between logical states are assumed to be instantaneous whilst occupation of a given logical state can endure over time. Thus in PDDL+ continuous update expressions are restricted to occur only in process effects. Actions and events, which are instantaneous, are restricted to the expression of discrete change. This introduces the before mentioned 3-part modelling of periods of continuous change: (1) an action or event starts a period of continuous change on a numeric variable expressed by means of a process; (2) the process realizes the continuous change of the numeric variable; (3) an action or event finally stops the execution of the process and terminates its effect on the numeric variable. Comment: the goals of the plan might be achieved before an active process is stopped.
This was the official language of the 3rd IPC in 2002. It introduced numeric fluents (e.g. to model non-binary resources such as fuel-level, time, energy, distance, weight, ...), plan-metrics (to allow quantitative evaluation of plans, and not just goal-driven, but utility-driven planning, i.e. optimization, metric-minimization/maximization), and durative/continuous actions (which could have variable, non-discrete length, conditions and effects). Eventually PDDL 2.1 allowed the representation and solution of many more real-world problems than the original version of the language.
The Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), commonly known as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), is an OASIS standard executable language for specifying actions within business processes with web services. Processes in BPEL export and import information by using web service interfaces exclusively.
Multi-agent Planning Language (MAPL, pronounced "maple") is an extension of PDDL 2.1 from around 2003. It is a quite serious modification of the original language. It introduces non-propositional state-variables (which may be n-ary: true, false, unknown, or anything else). It introduces a temporal model given with modal operators (before, after, etc.). Nonetheless in PDDL 3.0 a more thorough temporal model was given, which is also compatible with the original PDDL syntax (and it is just an optional addition). MAPL also introduces actions whose duration will be determined in runtime and explicit plan synchronization which is realized through speech act-based communication among agents. This assumption may be artificial, since agents executing concurrent plans shouldn't necessarily communicate to be able to function in a multi-agent environment. Finally, MAPL introduces events (endogenous and exogenous) for the sake of handling concurrency of actions. Thus events become part of plans explicitly, and are assigned to agents by a control function, which is also part of the plan.
Ontology with Polymorphic Types (OPT) was a profound extension of PDDL 2.1 by Drew McDermott from around 2003–2005 (with some similarities to PDDL+). It was an attempt to create a general-purpose notation for creating ontologies, defined as formalized conceptual frameworks for planning domains about which planning applications are to reason. Its syntax was based on PDDL, but it had a much more elaborate type system, which allowed users to make use of higher-order constructs such as explicit λ-expressions allowing for efficient type inference (i.e. not only domain objects had types (level 0 types), but also the functions/fluents defined above these objects had types in the form of arbitrary mappings (level 1 types), which could be generic, so their parameters (the domain and range of the generic mapping) could be defined with variables, which could have an even higher level type (level 2 type) not to speak of that the mappings could be arbitrary, i.e. the domain or range of a function (e.g. predicate, numeric fluent) could be any level 0/1/2 type. For example, functions could map from arbitrary functions to arbitrary functions...). OPT was basically intended to be (almost) upwardly compatible with PDDL 2.1. The notation for processes and durative actions was borrowed mainly from PDDL+ and PDDL 2.1, but beyond that OPT offered many other significant extensions (e.g. data-structures, non-Boolean fluents, return-values for actions, links between actions, hierarchical action expansion, hierarchy of domain definitions, the use of namespaces for compatibility with the semantic web).
Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a business process model.
This was the official language of the deterministic track of the 4th IPC in 2004. It introduced derived predicates (to model the dependency of given facts from other facts, e.g. if A is reachable from B, and B is reachable from C, then A is reachable from C (transitivity)), and timed initial literals (to model exogenous events occurring at given time independently from plan-execution). Eventually PDDL 2.2 extended the language with a few important elements, but wasn't a radical evolution compared to PDDL 2.1 after PDDL 1.2.
Probabilistic PDDL 1.0 (PPDDL) was the official language of the probabilistic track of the 4th and 5th IPC in 2004 and 2006 respectively. It extended PDDL 2.1 with probabilistic effects (discrete, general probability distributions over possible effects of an action), reward fluents (for incrementing or decrementing the total reward of a plan in the effects of the actions), goal rewards (for rewarding a state-trajectory, which incorporates at least one goal-state), and goal-achieved fluents (which were true, if the state-trajectory incorporated at least one goal-state). Eventually these changes allowed PPDDL 1.0 to realize Markov Decision Process (MDP) planning, where there may be uncertainty in the state-transitions, but the environment is fully observable for the planner/agent.
OWL became a formal W3C recommendation on February 10, 2004.
"The current WSDL standard operates at the syntactic level and lacks the semantic expressivity needed to represent the requirements and capabilities of Web Services. Semantics can improve software reuse and discovery, significantly facilitate composition of Web services and enable integration of legacy applications as part of business process integration. The Web Service Semantics document defines a mechanism to associate semantic annotations with Web services that are described using Web Service Description Language (WSDL)."
WSDL-S provides a methodology for annotating WSDL operations with metadata, preconditions, and effects.
Abstract Plan Preparation Language (APPL) is a newer variant of NDDL from 2006, which is more abstract than most existing planning languages such as PDDL or NDDL. The goal of this language was to simplify the formal analysis and specification of planning problems that are intended for safety-critical applications such as power management or automated rendezvous in future manned spacecraft. APPL used the same concepts as NDDL with the extension of actions, and also some other concepts, but still its expressive power is much less than PDDL's (in hope of staying robust and formally verifiable).
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.
This was the official language of the deterministic track of the 5th IPC in 2006. It introduced state-trajectory constraints (hard-constraints in form of modal-logic expressions, which should be true for the state-trajectory produced during the execution of a plan, which is a solution of the given planning problem) and preferences (soft-constraints in form of logical expressions, similar to hard-constraints, but their satisfaction wasn't necessary, although it could be incorporated into the plan-metric e.g. to maximize the number of satisfied preferences, or to just measure the quality of a plan) to enable preference-based planning. Eventually PDDL 3.0 updated the expressiveness of the language to be able to cope with recent, important developments in planning.
The Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), commonly known as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), is an OASIS standard executable language for specifying actions within business processes with web services. Processes in BPEL export and import information by using web service interfaces exclusively.
WSDL 2.0 became a W3C recommendation in June 2007. The changes are the following: added further semantics to the description language, removed message constructs, operator overloading not supported, PortTypes renamed to interfaces, and ports renamed to endpoints.
BPELscript is a language to specify BPEL processes. It provides a compact syntax inspired by scripting languages such as JavaScript and Ruby and a full coverage of all features provided by BPEL.
This was the official language of the deterministic track of the 6th and 7th IPC in 2008 and 2011 respectively. It introduced object-fluents (i.e. functions' range now could be not only numerical (integer or real), but it could be any object-type also). Thus PDDL 3.1 adapted the language even more to modern expectations with a syntactically seemingly small, but semantically quite significant change in expressiveness.
Adds "strict mode", a subset intended to provide more thorough error checking and avoid error-prone constructs. Clarifies many ambiguities in the 3rd edition specification, and accommodates behavior of real-world implementations that differed consistently from that specification. Adds some new features, such as getters and setters, library support for JSON, and more complete reflection on object properties.
OWL 2 became a W3C recommendation in October 2009.
Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a business process model.
This edition 5.1 of the ECMAScript standard is fully aligned with the third edition of the international standard ISO/IEC 16262:2011.
Relational Dynamic influence Diagram Language (RDDL) was the official language of the uncertainty track of the 7th IPC in 2011. Conceptually it is based on PPDDL 1.0 and PDDL 3.0, but practically it is a completely different language both syntactically and semantically. The introduction of partial observability is one of the most important changes in RDDL compared to PPDDL 1.0. It allows efficient description of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) by representing everything (state-fluents, observations, actions, ...) with variables. This way RDDL departs from PDDL significantly. Grounded RDDL corresponds to Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs) similarly to PPDDL1.0, but RDDL is more expressive than PPDDL 1.0.
Multi-agent PDDL (MA-PDDL) is a minimalistic, modular extension of PDDL 3.1 introduced in 2012 (i.e. a new :multi-agent requirement) that allows planning by and for multiple agents. The addition is compatible with all the features of PDDL 3.1 and addresses most of the issues of MAPL. It adds the possibility to distinguish between the possibly different actions of different agents (i.e. different capabilities). Similarly different agents may have different goals and/or metrics. The preconditions of actions now may directly refer to concurrent actions (e.g. the actions of other agents) and thus actions with interacting effects can be represented in a general, flexible way (e.g. suppose that at least 2 agents are needed to execute a lift action to lift a heavy table into the air, or otherwise the table would remain on the ground (this is an example of constructive synergy, but destructive synergy can be also easily represented in MA-PDDL). Moreover, as kind of syntactic sugar, a simple mechanism for the inheritance and polymorphism of actions, goals and metrics was also introduced in MA-PDDL (assuming :typing is declared). Since PDDL 3.1 assumes that the environment is deterministic and fully observable, the same holds for MA-PDDL, i.e. every agent can access the value of every state fluent at every time-instant and observe every previously executed action of each agent, and also the concurrent actions of agents unambiguously determine the next state of the environment. This was improved later by the addition of partial-observability and probabilistic effects (again, in form of two new modular requirements, :partial-observability and :probabilistic-effects, respectively, the latter being inspired by PPDDL 1.0, and both being compatible with all the previous features of the language, including :multi-agent).
TypeScript is a free and open source programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. It is a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript and adds optional static typing to the language. It is designed for the development of large applications and transpiles to JavaScript. As it is a superset of JavaScript, existing JavaScript programs are also valid TypeScript programs.
The 6th edition, ECMAScript 6 (ES6) and later renamed to ECMAScript 2015, was finalized in June 2015. This update adds significant new syntax for writing complex applications, including class declarations (class Foo { ... }), ES6 modules like import * as moduleName from "..."; export const Foo, but defines them semantically in the same terms as ECMAScript 5 strict mode. Other new features include iterators and for...of loops, Python-style generators, arrow function expression (() => {...}), let keyword for local declarations, const keyword for constant local declarations, binary data, typed arrays, new collections (maps, sets and WeakMap), promises, number and math enhancements, reflection, proxies (metaprogramming for virtual objects and wrappers) and template literals using backticks (`) for multi-line strings without escape characters. The complete list is extensive. As the first "ECMAScript Harmony" specification, it is also known as "ES6 Harmony".
The 7th edition, or ECMAScript 2016, was finalized in June 2016. Its features include block-scoping of variables and functions, destructuring patterns (of variables), proper tail calls, exponentiation operator ** for numbers, await, async keywords for asynchronous programming (as a preparation for ES2017), and the Array.prototype.includes function.
The exponentiation operator is equivalent to Math.pow, but provides a simpler syntax similar to languages like Python, F#, Perl, and Ruby. async / await was hailed as an easier way to use promises and develop asynchronous code.
The 8th edition, or ECMAScript 2017, was finalized in June 2017. Its features include the Object.values, Object.entries and Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptors functions for easy manipulation of Objects, async / await constructions which use generators and promises, and additional features for concurrency and atomics.
The 9th edition, or ECMAScript 2018, was finalized in June 2018. New features include the spread operator and rest parameters (...) for object literals, asynchronous iteration, Promise.prototype.finally and additions to RegExp.
The 10th edition, or ECMAScript 2019, was published in June 2019. Added features include, but are not limited to, Array.prototype.flat, Array.prototype.flatMap, changes to Array.sort and Object.fromEntries.
Array.sort is now guaranteed to be stable, meaning that elements with the same sorting precedence will appear in the same order in the sorted array. Array.prototype.flat(depth=1) flattens an array to a specified depth, meaning that all subarray elements (up to the specified depth) are concatenated recursively.
Another notable change is that so-called catch binding became optional.
The 11th edition, or ECMAScript 2020, was published in June 2020. In addition to new functions, this version introduces a BigInt primitive type for arbitrary-sized integers, the nullish coalescing operator, and the globalThis object.
BigInts are created either with the BigInt constructor or with the syntax 10n, where "n" is placed after the number literal. BigInts allow the representation and manipulation of integers beyond Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER, while Numbers are represented by a double-precision 64-bit IEEE 754 value. The built-in functions in Math are not compatible with BigInts; for example, exponentiation of BigInts must be done with the ** operator instead of Math.pow.
The nullish coalescing operator, ??, returns its right-hand side operand when its left-hand side is null or undefined. This contrasts with the || operator, which would return "string" for all "falsy" values.
The 12th edition, ECMAScript 2021, was published in June 2021. This version introduces the replaceAll method for strings; Promise.any, a promise combinator that short-circuits when an input value is fulfilled; AggregateError, a new error type to represent multiple errors at once; logical assignment operators (??=, &&=, ||=); WeakRef, for referring to a target object without preserving it from garbage collection, and FinalizationRegistry, to manage registration and unregistration of cleanup operations performed when target objects are garbage collected; separators for numeric literals (1_000); and Array.prototype.sort was made more precise, reducing the amount of cases that result in an implementation-defined sort order.
The 13th edition, ECMAScript 2022, was published in June 2022. This version introduces top-level await, allowing the keyword to be used at the top level of modules; new class elements: public and private instance fields, public and private static fields, private instance methods and accessors, and private static methods and accessors; static blocks inside classes, to perform per-class evaluation initialization; the #x in obj syntax, to test for presence of private fields on objects; regular expression match indices via the /d flag, which provides start and end indices for matched substrings; the cause property on Error objects, which can be used to record a causation chain in errors; the at method for Strings, Arrays, and TypedArrays, which allows relative indexing; and Object.hasOwn, a convenient alternative to Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty.