[roblabla]

For a side-project of mine, I decided to not use babel (or typescript or any transpilation at all), and I've got to say, post-babel life is awesome. Sure, you're limited in browser support. But it makes life so much easier, iteration time so much quicker, and we've got most of the es2015 goodies in browsers nowadays.

Being able to do the same on the backend side would be nice.

[joshuahutt]

If you're not using HMR and you're worried about iteration time, you're missing the biggest win. The time it takes to transpile a function is negligible.

http://matthewlehner.net/react-hot-module-replacement-with-w...

[roblabla]

You don't need babel to get HMR.

[qudat]

"But it makes life so much easier." Is this because you don't have to install a plugin for every thing you want? I found both babel and typescript to have a learning curve and a configuration step that required dev cycles being spent on getting it to work properly.

It really wasn't much of a difference in terms of getting things up and running.

Typescript has plenty of weird nuances and configuration settings that are required to get things working properly, just like babel.

[krainboltgreene]

Browser support is literally the tip of the iceberg.

[amake]

What literal iceberg would that be?