When comparing Parenscript vs Babel (6to5), the Slant community recommends Babel (6to5) for most people. In the question“What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript? ” Babel (6to5) is ranked 8th while Parenscript is ranked 35th. The most important reason people chose Babel (6to5) is:
Babel will turn your ES6+ code into ES5 friendly code, so you can start using it right now without waiting for browser support.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro It is Common Lisp
Lisps are easy languages to learn (once you get past the parens) and Common Lisp is a very practical dialect.
Pro Run almost identically on both the browser and server
Parenscript code can run almost identically on both the browser (as JavaScript) and server (as Common Lisp).
Pro Support ES6(Harmony)
Babel will turn your ES6+ code into ES5 friendly code, so you can start using it right now without waiting for browser support.
Pro Plugins for custom features
Pro Future forward thinking
Cons
Con The syntax may be hard to learn
Being an implementation of Lisp, Parenscript's syntax may seem cryptic and hard to understand for people not used to it. While Lisp has very little syntax compared to other languages and it's generally considered pretty terse, there's still an initial overhead in learning the language.
Con Generated ES5 is ugly and performs badly
Output looks far from handwritten ES5, is quite large with a lot of extra statements to execute.