The author posits that "Babel should come pre configured with the kitchen sink of JavaScript development - async await, decorators etc etc." There's a very goo

The author posits that "Babel should come pre configured with the kitchen sink of JavaScript development - async await, decorators etc etc." There's a very good reason that Babel doesn't, and we should actually be fairly grateful that the Babel team have made the considered decision not to include such things. First off, neither async/await nor decorators are actually part of ES2015. They're both TC39 proposals, at various stages of completion: https://github.com/tc39/ecma262 https://github.com/tc39/ecma262. Very justifiably, neither Babel 5 nor Babel 6 transpiled those out-of-the-box by default; for novice programmers, using language features that are unstable proposals that have not finalized is quite dangerous – what are you going to do if those proposals change, as the decorators proposal actually has changed? More specifically, there are meaningful issues with both of those transforms if used without further thought. Babel's stock transpilation of async/await brings in an entire runtime component in the form of the Regenerator runtime, and additionally requires that Promises exist in the JavaScript environment, which requires polyfills in the general case. For decorators, the proposal itself is still in flux. The current version of the proposal (https://github.com/wycats/javascript-decorators/blob/master/interop/reusability.md https://github.com/wycats/javascript-decorators/blob/master/...) is actually quite different from the old proposal, which was the one that was implemented in Babel 5. Additionally, the current proposal isn't even fully nailed down yet. Certainly one should not expect Babel to implement a language feature for which there isn't even yet a stable proposal! This isn't to say that Babel 6 is perfect, but the specific counterexamples the author of this post brings up are extremely weak, and if anything demonstrate very good choices on the part of the maintainers of Babel.