[throwaway284534]

6to5…err, I mean Babel, Already accomplished it’s mission to bridge the feature gap between older browser implementations. And like all bureaucratic melanomas, the maintainers made a strange decision to not only expand their domain to ES7, but to ALL FUTURE VERSIONS OF JAVASCRIPT FOREVER.

Babel became Webpackified and splintered into poorly understood preset bundles of the latest revelations of the TC39. A fractal of API documentation could then be written and rewritten again for the next mission: Newer is better. Modularize everything. Maintenance is a virtue.

I’m guessing that the brain trust at Babel HQ saw how the left-pad situation panned out and something clicked — we could turn our discrete task into an indefinitely lucrative operation as a rent seeking dependency for everyone. Every week could be infrastructure week so long as JavaScript kept adding features.

But what their hubris didn’t factor in was a petard hoisting much higher on the food chain — the Chromification of the web. Now that everyone who’s anyone is building a browser on the same engine, there’s no need for a second cabal of feature creatures to get a cut of the action.

It’s the same reason Firefox’s Wikipedia page has to be disambiguated with the term “cuckhold”; the same reason core-js can’t ask for a dime without macro fiscal policy being invoked by armchair techno economists. Why are you running out of money? Simple — We already paid for it!

These projects have transmuted one kind of technical debt into another, and the sooner they’re gone, the better we’ll all be in their absence. I would pray for a cosmic force to come and topple Babel back to earth, but the irony would be lost on them.

[driverdan]

I downvoted you because you made multiple bad faith accusations about people involved in these projects. Regardless of Babel's and Firefox's utility your negative snark isn't helping anyone.

[throwaway284534]

I do appreciate your transparency, though I disagree with the sentiment that I’m arguing from a position of bad faith.

The Babel team has not shown a moment of interest in lowering their role in the JavaScript ecosystem to anything short of kingmakers. I think the facts are self-evident, but I can easily back up my claims by citing pretty much any document the team has ever produced. Have a gander at their GitHub README and what do we see?[1]

- “Babel is a compiler for writing next generation JavaScript.” I suppose they left out “indefinitely” to avoid the obvious. Don’t forget, you’re here forever.

- Over a dozen sponsor logos. An embarrassment of riches.

- A literal audio recording of a song in praise of the project. The call is coming from inside the house, people!

The Babel team has a well documented history of their priorities[2], emphasizing the need for a modular approach that has no exit strategy[3]. At best, we have a case of accidental entrenchment and long term dependence on Babel brewing as early as 2017![4] At worst, we have a group of aspiring Carmack-wannabes looking for their big break into the incestuous and lucrative class of technorati standards committees.

Don’t believe me? It doesn’t take an inner-join on the TC39 roster and the Babel maintainers to see our own version of regulatory capture forming right before our eyes.

Compare this infinite circus to the humble but popular Normalize.css, which has the express purpose to stop existing.[5]

If the Babel team wants to raise some money, they can start by putting a plan together that would codify an exit strategy. It’s certainly more noble than their current plan of barnacling onto every NPM package…

- [1] https://github.com/babel/babel

- [2] https://github.com/babel/notes

- [3] https://github.com/babel/notes/blob/master/2016/2016-07/july...

- [4] https://github.com/babel/notes/blob/master/2017/2017-04/apri...

- [5] https://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize-css/

[briantakita]

The gist of the comment is that scope creep is expensive & mutates the original mission of the organization. Organizations tend to self-perpetuate via scope creep.