Really cool to see how far the project has come under Henry's stewardship. A fun story about how I got involved with the project: in Jan 2015 when I was working at Facebook on what would become React Native (was a secret project at the time), I was replacing an ad-hoc in-house built JS transformer and was building my own compiler. But then decided to give this "6to5" thing I've been hearing about a spin -- so I opened my first PR to the project:
We're looking into using 6to5 [what Babel was called at the time] for a project at Facebook -- and although we make the library -- the project is stuck for some time on React v0.11 which used a different transform.
https://github.com/babel/babel/pull/410
Was so impressed by the turnaround time on that PR and the overall quality of the project that I contacted @sebmck to see if we can recruit him to work with us. He was interested and so I referred him to a recruiter. A day later she comes back to me: "did you know this is a 17-year-old kid in the middle-of-nowhere in Australia?" (I didn't). We had to wait until he was 18 before we made him an offer and he joined our team :)
(eventually we got all of Facebook.com to run on Babel and not just React Native https://twitter.com/amasad/status/631251607422787584)
Like Henry mentions: working on 6.0 was hard and really controversial -- our vision for Babel was to serve as compiler infrastructure for JavaScript (which we've achieved to some extent since so many tools build on top of it and most users use it as part of a bigger toolchain like webpack) but many of our users disagreed with the direction and we were at the receiving end of much vitriol from the community (including here on HN). We're now vindicated (many times over) but goes to show how OSS maintainership can not only be a thankless job, but quite a stressful one too.
Thank you Henry and the rest of the team for you dedication.
We're looking into using 6to5 [what Babel was called at the time] for a project at Facebook -- and although we make the library -- the project is stuck for some time on React v0.11 which used a different transform.
https://github.com/babel/babel/pull/410
Was so impressed by the turnaround time on that PR and the overall quality of the project that I contacted @sebmck to see if we can recruit him to work with us. He was interested and so I referred him to a recruiter. A day later she comes back to me: "did you know this is a 17-year-old kid in the middle-of-nowhere in Australia?" (I didn't). We had to wait until he was 18 before we made him an offer and he joined our team :)
(eventually we got all of Facebook.com to run on Babel and not just React Native https://twitter.com/amasad/status/631251607422787584)
Like Henry mentions: working on 6.0 was hard and really controversial -- our vision for Babel was to serve as compiler infrastructure for JavaScript (which we've achieved to some extent since so many tools build on top of it and most users use it as part of a bigger toolchain like webpack) but many of our users disagreed with the direction and we were at the receiving end of much vitriol from the community (including here on HN). We're now vindicated (many times over) but goes to show how OSS maintainership can not only be a thankless job, but quite a stressful one too.
Thank you Henry and the rest of the team for you dedication.