Babel

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “the "standard" Emacs OrgMode Babel setup which I found an incredible amplifier for my work”

  POSITIVE · Hacker News · 2026-06-09

• “developers configure Babel to transpile their code to some ancient version, the output is bloated (and slower to execute, since passes like regenerator have a lot of overhead), and then the website doesn't even work on the putatively supported ancient browsers”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-03-22

• “elisp generated in org mode babel blocks which is instantly executable is a fine way to have gptel improve itself”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-14

• “We switched a CI pipeline from babel to SWC last year and got roughly 8x improvement.”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-02-23

• “I really do miss org-babel-tangle. In contexts where doctests aren't available it can be really helpful for making sure code listings actually work.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-02-22

• “I use org-babel to call a shell script that updates an exported HTML block in-line. I use this trick to tweak a common HTML fragment (like email form) in one place and expand it into custom HTML, wherever I need to.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-01-10

• “Switched to client-side Babel transpilation - now previews render in <1s”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-01-07

• “Emacs also has Org-mode and org-babel, which can work a lot like a Jupyter notebook, and can even talk to jupyter kernels”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-11-11