JavaScript was announced on 4 December 1995. The company Sun (where Java was created) filed a trademark for “JavaScript” on 1 December 1995. Since then, Oracle bought Sun and now owns the trademark.

Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js and Deno, argues: “The trademark has no commercial value. [...] Nevertheless [it] is a dark cloud looming over the world’s most popular programming language. Careful law abiding engineers bend over backwards to avoid its use - leading to confusing terms like ECMAScript. [...] Oracle, please release the JavaScript trademark.”

Highlights of this release:

• New default values reflect the stabilization of the proposals for decorators and Records/Tuples.
• A new version of @babel/plugin-proposal-decorators tracks the changes that were made to the decorators proposal when it advanced to stage 3.
• Babel now supports the proposal “RegExp duplicate named capturing groups”, which allows re-using the same group name in alternative RegExp branches.

Highlights of this release:

• Better formatting for JSX, TypeScript and JavaScript
• Format via CLI using standard input
• New lint rules and various fixes for the existing ones
• New core architecture
• Better Visual Studio Code support

“The guide provides an overview of supply chain security features available in npm, describes the risks associated with using dependencies, and lays out best practices to reduce those risks at different project stages. The guidelines cover, for example, how to set up a secure CI configuration, how to avoid dependency confusion, and how to limit the consequences of a hijacked dependency. Developers who follow this guide will proactively harden their npm packages against the most common supply chain attacks.”

package.json has the property "scripts" which lets us define package scripts, small shell scripts that perform package-related tasks such as compiling artifacts or running tests:

{
  ···
  "scripts": {
    "tsc": "tsc",
    "tscwatch": "tsc --watch",
    "tscclean": "shx rm -rf ./dist/*"
  },
  ···
}

Package scripts are executed via npm run – for example, we can execute the first script via npm run tsc.

This blog post explains package scripts and how we can write them so that they work on both Windows and Unixes (macOS, Linux, etc.).