Something needs to change. I don't care about one specific proposal.

It's miserable having a de-facto build step for an interpreted language. Worst of both worlds.

Maybe just TS is fast, but it encourages developers to put more and more stuff into that build step (and they do, they do that a lot). Culturally, that trend is not going to change unless the main reason for having said build step is removed.

The whole babel/transpiling thing was meant to be temporary. It became temporarily permanent / permanently temporary.

I'm the person who is developing a permanent solution.

Which is?

A standard environment in which to run code that extends the builtin parser.

Please elaborate!

The proposal is to introduce a whole slew of syntax to JS that according to the proposal will have no meaning. This is a paradox. You have only created a language if you can use it to convey meaning

That's not entirely true. Ideally, there would be a follow up with a reflection API.

Also, comments are syntax and they're mostly meaningless. By your reasoning, programming languages should have no comments.

So, it's not really a qualitative issue (presence of meaningless syntax) but a quantitative one (presence of lots of parsing complexity).

If you say that whatever data is put there doesn't matter at all, the one thing you definitely cannot ever do later is give it meaning.

Unless I say it's meaning is to be optionally reflected upon during runtime!

Look, I understand the purism and mostly, I agree. But this is not a clean slate language, it will never be perfect and it's going to become more and more idiosyncratic as times go by.

I don't see how it's optional.

Comments are a kind of freedom in code. You're completely free to use them precisely because (in a plain execution environment) they cannot influence the result of evaluation

If comments /can/ change the result of evaluation then you simply are not (completely) free to use them. (And yes I know that this is a simplification in JS where you can already get the source code of a function with toString... Ugh)

Makes sense. I'm excited for your solution, despite not having seen it. If you can solve that, it would be awesome.

Why?

In short, we can do much better. I'm building a full syntax extension/macro evaluation mechanism for JS.

Where is it? What is it called?

It's called BABLR as it takes concepts from Babel (transpiling) and ANTLR (parsing arbitrary syntax). https://github.com/bablr-lang/

I'm currently in the process of trying to pull together our first big release.