JavaScript Or ECMAScript?

You will read on this site and many other resources something called Ecma international, ECMAScript, ES2015, ES6 and many other numbered variants. But what has this got to do with JavaScript?

The answer is JavaScript is based on a scripting language specification called ECMAScript. ECMAScript aims to create a general purpose, cross platform, vendor-neutral programming language.

Other languages can also be created using this specification. This specification is published by Ecma International.

JavaScript is a language/implementation based on this specification.

Along with this you will also hear ECMAScript version/edition numbers. In the early versions they moved up numerically i.e. ES1, ES2, etc until version 6 which was released in 2015. This was a relatively big update and introduced lots of new features, many of which we will cover in this course.

From this version onward, the decision was made to make annual updates, leaving the version numbers reflecting the year of release (ES2015, ES2016 etc…).

Each annual update provides new features and updates to the specification and therefore the JavaScript language.