The last 2 ECMA releases (2017 and 2016) have felt pretty dull honestly. I wonder if their approval process for features is too slow. In 2016 we got almost nothing, power operator and array.includes(). 2017 We finally got async functions, which have been in consideration for years now, a few helper functions, and shared memory. Object Rest/Spread would have probably made up for it, but now we'll have to wait at least another year even though it's been stage 3 for quite some time.

With the language moving this slow compared to faster releasing languages like Python, Elixir, and Go, I wonder if Node.js will start to see a decline in hype since the language hasn't improved much in the last 2 years. What do you guys think?

It’s not exactly surprising. ES6 came out almost 6 years after ES5, so there was quite a few changes then. The yearly release cycle was always going to mean fewer features being standardised each release.

While I do follow from a distance some of the work TC39 does, I can only assume that most people involved have realised that having an orderly process for feature proposals - and not trying to rush heaps of features into a single release - is a much better way to do things.

> With the language moving this slow compared to faster releasing languages like Python, Elixir, and Go

Python, Elixir and Go have the advantage that they have one main/reference implementation and can break backwards compatibility whenever they want (although that hasn’t gone brilliantly for Python) by just incrementing a version number. ECMAScript runtimes have to be able to run programs that were written almost two decades ago - backwards compatibility can’t be broken - and you have several major implementations (V8, Spidermonkey, etc.) to deal with.

The tail call feature from ES6 is already being revisited because it caused problems [0].

> I wonder if Node.js will start to see a decline in hype since the language hasn't improved much in the last 2 years.

Tools like Babel mean that people who really want to use new or experimental language features can do so. There are dozens of language features in the proposals pipeline [1] and many (if not a majority) can be used via a compiler like Babel or via a polyfill.

Node.js also has the advantages of having it’s own 'standard library’ and an enormous package ecosystem to use. I think it will be fine.

[0] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-ptc-syntax [1] https://github.com/tc39/proposals