Babel

Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 8 years (2015–2022), in 10 threads.

People raised many different problems with Babel, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 15 complaints

Couldn't figure out how to transpile a single file without a full build pipeline2022-07-29
Transpiler-introduced bugs are hard to find and debugging breaks down2021-05-11
Transpiled code is hard to debug; one line hides many implicit objects and steps2019-07-07
Babel builds time out and need manual patching of Metro to work2017-12-28
Does nothing by default, so users must configure everything themselves, causing days of pain2016-12-06
Upgrading to Babel 6 cost days of work and caused frustration breaking existing builds2016-12-05
Needs many config files and cryptic build errors before the first example works2016-12-05
Default settings kept changing, so users had to fight them to configure the compiler2016-12-05
Configuring the tool is confusing and the migration path was poorly explained, breaking existing setups2016-12-05
Upgrading to Babel 6 was painful, unintuitive and consumed days of work2016-12-05
Toolchain is hard to use; battling dependency breakage and hours searching for patched modules2016-10-03
Confusing that the .babelrc config file must be specified in every folder2016-04-26
CLI does nothing useful by default, requiring many modules and .babelrc setup2016-03-28
Runtime errors lack useful line numbers and code is hard to step through2016-02-13
Hard to get a working frontend build setup because of many plugins2015-12-16