I just thought I'd get some hard numbers on TC39 proposals, so I went through all the proposals listed at the GitHub - tc39/proposals: Tracking ECMAScript Proposals repository and categorized them according to whether they have semantic nature (defined as: they specify a change detectable by code at runtime), syntactic nature (defined as: cannot be polyfilled without a change to the engine), or both. I've uploaded it as a gist here:
ECMA262 proposal summary.md
# Totals
### Proposals by acceptance status
| Status | Syntactic only | Any Syntactic | Total | Any Semantic | Semantic only |
| ------ | -------------: | ------------: | ----: | ------------: | ------------: |
| Stage 4 | 6 (10.2%) | 27 (45.8%) | **59** | 53 (89.8%) | 32 (54.2%) |
| Stage 3 | 1 (6.7%) | 9 (60%) | **15** | 14 (93.3%) | 6 (40%) |
| Stage 2.7 | 0 (0%) | 0 (0%) | **3** | 3 (100%) | 3 (100%) |
| Stage 2 | 0 (0%) | 10 (41.7%) | **24** | 24 (100%) | 14 (58.3%) |show original
Successful proposals.md
# Finished Proposals
Finished proposals are proposals that have reached stage 4, and are included in the [latest draft](https://tc39.es/ecma262/) of the specification.
| Syntactic | Semantic | Proposal | Author | Champion(s) | TC39 meeting notes | Expected Publication Year |
| :-------: | :------: | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------- | ------------------------- |
| | ✓ | [`Array.prototype.includes`][array-includes] | Domenic Denicola | Domenic Denicola<br />Rick Waldron | [November 2015][array-includes-notes] | 2016 |
| ✓ | ✓ | [Exponentiation operator][exponentiation] | Rick Waldron | Rick Waldron | [January 2016][exponentiation-notes] | 2016 |
| | ✓ | [`Object.values`/`Object.entries`][object-values-entries] | Jordan Harband | Jordan Harband | [March 2016][object-values-entries-notes] | 2017 |
| | ✓ | [String padding][string-padding] | Jordan Harband | Jordan Harband<br />Rick Waldron | [May 2016][string-padding-notes] | 2017 |show original
Unsuccessful proposals.md
# Stage 1 Proposals
Stage 1 proposals represent problems that the committee is interested in spending time exploring solutions to.
Proposals follow [this process document](https://tc39.es/process-document/).
show original
I've rather arbitrarily defined stage 2+ proposals as "Successful" and stage 1- proposals as "Unsuccessful", on account of U comes after S, both of those come after E, and I wanted the document with the totals to appear first in the list.