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Babel is not actually very useful and gets less useful every year. It's "used by millions" because the JS ecosystem is a shitshow. I would rather pay money to o
by morelisp 4y ago
Babel is not actually very useful and gets less useful every year. It's "used by millions" because the JS ecosystem is a shitshow. I would rather pay money to our dependencies that pull in Babel transitively to fully divorce themselves from it.
Also discussed at the time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114718 - many (including me) think they were not spending the money they did have very effectively.
- draw_down 4y agoI don’t like it either, but it’s not used because it’s well liked. It’s used because it is in fact useful
- morelisp 4y agoBluntly, I don't agree, at least as much as "useful" means "improves developer efficiency or software quality". I think you can argue it was useful at one time - which I'd still probably argue against, there's always been unbundled alternatives with lots of advantages, but it'd be a much stronger case - but by 2021, that ship was definitely sunk. Babel is here today because of CRA, and CRA is, has always been, a horrible idea possible only because nobody gave a shit about anything other than wall-clock-time-to-series-A for over a decade.
- kosievdmerwe 4y agoI don't know JS at all, I just found it funny that in my modern Chrome browser the example automated conversion just output exactly the same JS as was input.