https://hackingandslacking.com/compile-frontend-javascript-with-babel-and-gulp-99e653d50d15

As you may have already deduced from the occasional glaring holes in my programming knowledge, I haven’t spent as much of my life programming than, well, anybody who haphazardly threw away an 8-year product management career. Apparently, a lot can happen in 8 years… especially when it comes to JavaScript.Putting aside that whole server-side NodeJS thing or whatever it’s called, there’s years worth of mindfucks for those of us who fairly recently returned to dev. In our absence, the world has been Grunting, Gulping, Yarning and even NPMing. Let’s assume we’ve gotten past all of that… phew. Oh wait, I forgot to mention the monstrosity of “hey by way there’s this mess of a hardly-explained (protocol? organization? Fancy Github Repo?) called Babel that we all depend on to do meaningful shit in the browser these days.”

If you’re here because you’re trying to figure what the hell all these ‘const’ and ‘import’ keywords are doing in modern-day browser JavaScript, consider this half focus-group and half getting-started tutorial. For the rest of you experienced JS devs out there, perhaps you should stay. No, by all means, I’d like you to sit here and think about the kind of ecosystem you’ve decided to patch together. Do it; otherwise, I might just give Kik a call to see what other tiny NPM modules they’d like to arbitrarily demand the removal of… remember that? Exactly. Now think about what you’ve done.