Dear JavaScript

I understand that hearing rants about your brainchild that took so much hard work is hard and depressing. I was in your shoes, too. And being a head of popular open source project is very emotionally unrewarding, to say the least. And thank you for your hard work — like nearly every front end developer out there, I used Babel, and it did it job, eventually.

However, I am one of those people who think that Babel6 is terrible, that it "broke the web", and it marked the beginning of the entire JavaScript fatigue era. Babel6 transition took three days of my life, filled it with misery and rage, lost me a customer, and led to my desire to never touch JavaScript again if I can help it. (I moved to ScalaJS eventually).

I ranted about it, too. Like nearly everyone else, I forgot that there are live people behind every project, with their dreams, hopes and justifications for every decision. I didn't want to attack you personally — I just vented my (very real) rage against Babel6 itself, without thinking anything about its author. So, well, nice to meet you.

And I still stand by what I said. Despite your good intentions, it is still terrible, and unintuitive, and definitely not a "something for everyone", unless frustration is something. And I can't think of any way of fixing it, except of moving to another stack (which I did). If there were many people ranting about Babel6 like I did, (and I can imagine), I am truly sorry for the mental suffering you had to endure.

You are cool. You are significantly more competent developer than I am. I use your software, not the other way around. And it is free. But Babel6 is still terrible, and no input from your side can change my opinion. Or perhaps it could, if you provided some technical justification for what you did. But this article is the request to stop ranting about your work, as it hurts you.

For that, I am sorry.

This is actually a very interesting comparison.

Why the flying blue !@#$ would anybody think that Babel 6's Configuration over Convention decision was the wrong way to go? It was absolutely the right thing to do. It made Babel a far more uniform and simple piece of software, and actually made it easier to use.

Why?

I think some of us are bothered by it because we tend to to think of ourselves as logical and rational, and we expect others like us to behave in the same way.

From observing things over the past decade, it appears to me that there are plenty of developers who are willing to fly off the handle and write whiny rants about things that irritate them.

Maybe part of it is that the posts that sound like they're written by a petulant child get the most attention. I often find myself disagreeing with points in them, but have never felt the need to spout insults about libraries and frameworks or their creators.

Up 'til now, I've been content to reply to these rants on HN and Reddit, and try to inject a bit of reason and calm into the discussion. I think it's time to be more courageous.

I'd like to start writing rebuttal blog posts in which I tell the authors they sound like whiny ingrates and demonstrate how they could have written their criticism constructively. I'm just not sure whether trying be be reasonable will actually help the community, or will just get me lots of nasty replies and e-mails.