Live data from Hacker News

Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

babeljs.io

51–60 of 729 posts

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#51

I wonder if the community would be a better source of funding than corporate donors? Something like Gitcoin. Not sure if anyone has any data on this...

Individuals have a few $ a month to spend on charity like this. Companies, you know, the ones that make millions and billions off of open source software, have a lot more. If I'm ever in a position where I can manage funds or chat with a manager, I'd have my company donate a lot more to OS products.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#52
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last sentence is worth emphasizing. Many people misunderstand the tragedy of the commons as an argument why a commons can't work, but the only possible conclusion is that the commons can't work under the current economic system (and specifically the dominant school of economic thought of the past half century). The usual example given is a pasture shared by shepherds who are each going to optimize their use of t…

Capitalism represents a solution to the tragedy of the commons: Privatize it. You guys are interpreting this as a takedown of capitalism when it's the exact opposite. Capitalism represents a solution to this issue. You might not like that solution, but this circumstance just goes to show that naive attempts to reinvent capitalism are unlikely to work.

Contrarily to the common claim of capitalism, this wouldn’t be an optimal solution. Let’s say there are ten shepherds sharing the fields. You privatize it and in a short amount of time, there will be one shepherd left, ultra rich, and nine unemployed shepherds. So capitalism is a good system to optimize the value of the field, not its value for society.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#53

11k salary lol

I was going to give a similar comment here. I get that this is more common in the US compared to Europe or asian countries, but I'd expect that 5-6k a month would be a far more reasonable salary. You're not in open source for the big payout I assume.. And then again, 2k just to help on the side, that's about minimum wage here for full time employment.

OTOH, Babel is a piece of critical infrastructure, a core of every modern web product's path from development to production. It's not a junior / medior developer job to manage and develop a project like that.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#55
post #24

This is another case of tragedy of the commons. Individually, it doesn't make sense for a company to donate. I can't even resent them, since it puts the company at a (slight) disadvantage. Unless I was flush with cash, I probably wouldn't donate from company funds if I were an entrepreneur. But collectively, we would all benefit to fund something like this. (Edit: I like culturestate's response of budgeting a small a…

Your last sentence is worth emphasizing. Many people misunderstand the tragedy of the commons as an argument why a commons can't work, but the only possible conclusion is that the commons can't work under the current economic system (and specifically the dominant school of economic thought of the past half century). The usual example given is a pasture shared by shepherds who are each going to optimize their use of t…

I think you might be interested in my comment sibling to yours about the work of Elinor Ostrom. She spent her life documenting those systems.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#56
post #24

This is another case of tragedy of the commons. Individually, it doesn't make sense for a company to donate. I can't even resent them, since it puts the company at a (slight) disadvantage. Unless I was flush with cash, I probably wouldn't donate from company funds if I were an entrepreneur. But collectively, we would all benefit to fund something like this. (Edit: I like culturestate's response of budgeting a small a…

Your last sentence is worth emphasizing. Many people misunderstand the tragedy of the commons as an argument why a commons can't work, but the only possible conclusion is that the commons can't work under the current economic system (and specifically the dominant school of economic thought of the past half century). The usual example given is a pasture shared by shepherds who are each going to optimize their use of t…

That's mistaken in two ways.

First, the tragedy of the commons - aka the public goods problem - is an argument why a commons can't work, full stop. It's precisely mathematically specified. If the conclusion doesn't hold, that's because the assumptions didn't hold. You can certainly argue that the assumptions don't hold in many places, e.g. among Maine lobster gangs or in the woods around Japanese villages, and indeed that's what various authors have done. They have not argued - and it would make little sense - that a different economic system would magically make public goods games have a different equilibrium.

Second, you're mistaken in assuming that actors in successfully maintained commons are economically irrational. One simple interpretation of these commons is that they are repeated games. In such games it is rational to cooperate to preserve the commons, since defection leads to others defecting in future. That is standard economic rationality. Elinor Ostrom put forward that interpretation sometimes. She also emphasized that communities used things like punishments and fines to sanction uncooperative behaviour - again, these mechanisms work for standard homo economicus reasons.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#57
post #13

If you want to make money and pay developers a salary, you need a product. I don’t want my js tooling to be a commercial product (hi Rome). Can we go back to the original spirit of OSS where everybody donates a little of their time instead?

The original spirit of open source software is free as in freedom, not free as in beer. People have to make a living. And who will manage that thing where everybody donates a little of their time? Babel has nearly 600 open issues and 150 outstanding pull requests; it's a full time job just to manage that.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#58
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yah that includes also any random automated job too… and there are many of them.

Even if those 29 million weekly downloads were all automated it would still imply 29 million users have setup automated jobs for building software with Babel.

That does not follow.

There are definitely many CI pipelines that download all packages every time they're triggered. For those pipelines you'd be looking at tens of installs per day (or more).

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#59

Saying you're used by millions when you're a javascript library is a bit disingenuous. It's not like whoever happens to hit a website using your scripts is a user in the common sense of the word.

The fact you're calling it a JS library embedded in a web page already shows you don't actually know (and probably don't care) what Babel is.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#60
post #35

BabelJS's idea is so simple, yet huge. BabelJS, or, as I like to call them in my talks, is the "Age of transpilers". The idea of having some sort of meta layer that you compile from to another source is old, but totally underrated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler With my team we optimized render processes using transpilers/meta language and this totally rocks. I hope that BabelJS will continue…

Transpilers are bad. They add to the already giant mess of unnecessary JS tooling. How much of them is really needed, and how much is there just for webdevs to show their "street cred?" Not a lot at all. Not only the debugging is breaking down because of them, but they often introduce bugs on their own which are very hard to find. Framework authors force involuntary decision to use transpilers on people downstream, a…

Nonsense. Transpilers have been misused at times in the javascript community, but overall they have played a *massive* role in modernizing javascript and enabling us to write much sounder, more robust, and bug-free code that runs everywhere, including on older devices and runtimes. Society as a whole has benefited immensely from babel and other transpilers.

As time goes on, transpilers may ultimately become slightly less valuable, however for the past decade they have allowed us to grow and improve our javascript without sacrificing portability.

Post reply on HN