It’s a great question, and for the folks who knows the answer of why generators misunderstood, they surely discovered this feature in the most unpleasant circumstances.

Generators were introduced during JavaScript’s awkward adolescence, where the cutting edge of ES6 was only possible through Babel (which was then called 6to5). They’re fantastic for turning array like classes into iterable collections. But that’s not what makes them bad.

For a time you had a perfect storm of JavaScript Hell. Promises were polyfilled and rewritten as generators to take advantage of the `yield` keyword. You’ll most likely find out about this trick at the least opportune time: while debugging an async redux action. Now every single stack trace is a high-stakes game of “detangle the Christmas lights!

This was truly a horrible time to be a front end developer. Not only did you have to transpile your code, you had to debug it through a source map wrung through Webpack’s module system. And while you’re picking through this mud ball of a web app, there’s a Super Senior Software Engineer giving a talk on the virtues of observable data management!

I’ve always suspected that these galaxy brain engineers are more like window washers on an ivory tower. And as for the rest of us, we’re just the code gnomes who are shrug when given triangular bricks until told how round bricks are actually better.

I know this is all hyperbole but the emotion is real. For every productive hour of work gained through a new and necessary features, engineers have lost 10-fold on the lesser well-thought out JavaScript. I’m not so sure that native observables will be any different.