Search posts, tags, users, and pages
As you were one of the initial contributors of Babel.js, what was the motive behind creating the library? How it become a separate project? Please share the story. :)
Seb really deserves all the credit for the creation of Babel/6to5. I joined in early on, but it’s really his story. He’ll probably cringe at my response to this, but I’ll share the story anyways.
When I first found 6to5 (which was Babel’s original name), I was really excited because I had been a bit frustrated with other tooling that existed at the time.
My friend Jason Laster had been talking about AST transformations a few months before and remember thinking “that shit is magic which can’t possibly work reliably, regex replacement is much easier to deal with”
When I came across the Babel codebase a bunch of things clicked. At the time it only did like 4 things and it was very small and easy to follow along with. But I was still convinced that Seb must’ve been some computer science grad that I couldn’t keep up with.
I reached out to Seb via email because I wanted to contribute to his project. It was fairly small things, but I spent hours writing those emails because I was terrified to get something wrong.
Then I found out he was still in high school and had far less experience than me. I was confused.
It’s easy to then think that Seb is some super young genius, but that’s really the wrong thing to take away. Seb’s no genius, having been friends for a few years now I could tell you all sorts of dumb shit he’s done.
But when he started 6to5, Seb came at it with a really great attitude and really strong motivation. Something that I’ve since tried adopting for myself.
Babel’s really not that complicated. If you want to learn about it I have all sorts of resources for you:
Complexity isn’t that hard to deal with if you come at it with the right attitude. Don’t be afraid to get involved because something seems above you. It’s really not, and the people who try to claim that it is are stupid assholes.