JavaScript, like many other programming languages, is constantly evolving. There's a whole bunch of new features that have been added over the last few years that make it easier to build and maintain larger applications. But older browsers don't know about these new features, so you if you need your website to support something like IE8 or Android 2.3, you normally can't use them. Babel lets you write code using the new JavaScript features, and then translates it to code that does the same thing without using those features. So the copy of the source code that you deal with uses the nice new constructs and your final code can still run on those older browsers. More on reddit.com

Taking the individual developer productivity vs salary-level issues out of this for a second: The current donation model doesn't work. Companies are not in any way incentivized to donate unless they absolutely need a feature or bug fix. Altruism is not a sufficient motivator. Here's a tried and true license structure. If you or your company have less than $10M in revenue and you use Babel, you don't pay anything. Do what you want with the source. If your company has revenue over $10M and you're using Babel in your stack, you pay a license fee. If the license fee is $400, then 500 companies yield $200K paid to the project. This type of license structure works great in the games industry. Before people scream that there's loopholes here, of course there will be gaming of this with forks, etc. but that's easily arbitrated because it's freaking open source. Stats can be ran. Also before people scream "Then it's not free software!" The whole point of this discussion is that an open source project should be able to have a fulltime developer that can get paid. How that money gets to that developer is an arbitrary monetization strategy for the project. Right now, a project sponsor is buying two things: paying insurance that the project will keep going, AND they are paying marketing to brand themselves as community supporters. That's obviously not enough incentive. More on reddit.com

I was using babel all last week and this is my understanding of it. Others likely can go more in depth or correct where I went wrong here.

Presets

These are just a list of sharable .babelrc configs which contain a list of babel plugins.

Plugins

This is a snippet of code that preforms a specific transformation. The example I will use here is the trailing function comma plugin. When your run your babel command, it looks through your .babelrc file and runs each of the plugins (from the presets too) on your file(s).

Babel env

Oh lordy, this is supposed to save everything. Babel env preset is supposed to remove* the need for you to define and install your own plugins. It has everything for you. All you need to do is define your target and babel will include the plugins you need.

One thing that really helped me was to use the debug option.

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Iñárritu is one of my favorite filmmakers currently working. Every single movie he’s made is fantastic and his evolution as a filmmaker is insane. I love how emotional all of his work his, but Babel is a shining example of how emotionally draining his films can be. I feel like I just did a workout or something after every viewing. With my first watch, I really was not a fan of the Japanese subplot, but it grew on me over time.

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