[recursive]

Because one day ES6 will run in browsers without a build step.

[akst]

In my experience all non-trivial frontend project I've worked on have ended up with some kind of build step (minification, linting, concating, ect), with or without a compile2JS language.

This isn't an issue for node projects as you can simply `require` the `coffee-script/register` module and node handles coffee scripts for you via normal `requires`.

[Touche]

You don't actually need a build step for either in development. Any client-side loader can compile your CS code on the fly.

[matthewmacleod]

I'm not sure that's a convincing argument – you will in almost every conceivable case have a build pipeline in place anyway, so there's not really a cost there.

[Touche]

I don't set up a "build pipeline" until I'm sure the app is going to deployed to a production environment. Why would I set up a build for what is essentially a fiddle, or if I'm just experimenting? The now-common workflow where people write build scripts at the start of a new project is just bizarre to me.

[iopq]

Sure, and why do people use C anyway? You can write binary directly without any kind of make utility.

[recursive]

Probably because machine code is not very human comprehensible.

[iopq]

Neither is minimized JavaScript

[mistercow]

You're partially right, but every build step has a cost when you're working on a large project.

[mambodog]

Yeah but then we'll just be compiling our ES8 code with 8to6.

[spellboots]

Is that a major concern? In practice, it's unlikely any serious use of ES6 will run in a browser without a build step due to concatenation, minification etc