ES2016: Exponents and Includes

December 23, 2018

I'm starting to feel like a broken record, but once again, JavaScript ES2016 jumps into 2009 with a few nifty features! (I kid, I kid, these updates are great for the language and although small in the grand scheme of the other things, they're important to recognize.)

Exponentiation Operator **

A real math operator for exponents! How'd it take so many years?

var calculatedNumber = 2**4
calculatedNumber // 16

What else got included this year? (I'm sorry--this joke is too easy!)

[].includes

Remember the .includes function introduced for Strings in ES2015? Well, ES2016 capitalizes on that victory by adding a [].includes method that works exactly as the String method does, except on Arrays!

var nums = [1,2,3,4,5]
nums.includes(2) // true
nums.includes(7) // false