> Babel allows a fantastic degree of power in code transformation

That's still not homoiconicity. It reminds me old Stuart Sierra's presentation from Clojure/conj¹. Around 6 minute mark: "Adding eval to a language, even successfully, does not count as homoiconicity"... "and you didn't even succeed at that..."

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¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7zyGMcav3c