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I write JavaScript daily and my gripe with Babel (and transpilers in general) in the JS ecosystem is that it makes it easy to have 10 dependencies written in 10
by jhardy54 6y ago
I write JavaScript daily and my gripe with Babel (and transpilers in general) in the JS ecosystem is that it makes it easy to have 10 dependencies written in 10 similar-but-different languages. If you have to edit a dependency then you're stuck editing their source file (written in ES6-ES11 plus random unaccepted proposals / TypeScript / Coffeescript / Purescript / etc), installing their devDeps tree to run their build process, integrating their sourcemaps to un-break your stack traces, and writing code in a slightly different language each time you make a change. It's exhausting.
It's really neat that we have the option to transpile, and I was actively working on transpilers in the Meteor ecosystem when they were all the rage, but at this point I try to avoid them whenever I can.