Inconsistently Insightful

Babel is great, and by all means use it if it makes it easier to develop your application. If you're developing a library on the other hand, please take a moment to consider whether you actually need Babel. Maybe you can write a few more lines of utility code and forego the need to pre-process. If you're only targeting some platforms, you may not need anything more than plain old ES6. At the very least, make sure you know what Babel is doing for you, and what it's not. Some developers believe that Babel is protecting us from a great demon of code complexity when, in truth, browsers and node are pretty easy to deal with on their own. Let's take a look at some of the strategies for not needing Babel. ES5 is pretty okay: In the days when we used tables for layout and the debugger was named alert() , we would have been so grateful if JavaScript had the features that ES5 has today. If you truly need Babel you are not only a weak programmer, but also an ingrate. Face ...