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Comment by nkg | Hacker News Reader

I will welcome ".include(a)" into my code in place of the awkward ".indexOf(a)!== -1". Better late than never, I guess.

Too bad it was renamed. "Contains" was a much better name.

"Contains" is used everywhere else - the DOM API included (Element.classList.contains).

If I remember correctly, the array methods `.includes`, `.every`, and `.some` were renamed because of collision with prototype.js's `.contains`, `.all`, and `.any` respectively.

It's very unfortunate that the APIs of libraries that extend JavaScript builtins affect the development of the language to this degree.

That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Why would that matter? That would encourage me the naming choice was in the right direction!

Lots of websites still use Prototype.js. Magento still has it as a dependency. Don't want to break the web!

Would it be bad though? A lot of APIs change in the browser space. WebRTC was broken a hundred times. Libraries depending on Prototype would probably be old, maybe insecure. You need to break it from time to time, you can't be backwards compatible all the time.

Would it break the web though? Wouldn't they just override the native implementation with a JS one?

Then the two implementations would probably be incompatible (different signatures, different implementation / return values) and would cause unexpected errors down the chain. So, essentially, breaking the web and making it difficult to fix it.

`.includes()` is used in lodash so lots of JavaScript developers are already used to that anyway.

Lodash switched to using includes when it became clear the standard was going to use includes. See e.g. Lodash 2 docs which had contains as the standard name, and `include` as the alias: https://lodash.com/docs/2.4.2#contains

A little less awkward:

  ~array.indexOf(a)

https://www.joezimjs.com/javascript/great-mystery-of-the-til...

I think that's worse because it's more difficult to understand.

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