alt Hacker NewsIt's great people experiment. Yet, after a quick glance the framework seems to break expected semantics for no gain? For example: the "component" construct auto-renders the JSX within the brackets instead of being a function that "returns a view as value" (if I understood correctly). I'm cool with breaking the "f(x)=>UI" but what for? The TS and VS Code integration is all fine and good but what's the gain of using JSX (again) instead of the beloved HTML-like Svelte markup? Have people ever loved JSX? Nostalgia maybe? Again, I'm all for tearing down the house but shouldn't we get more elegance or expressive semantics in return?
Still, great he did it I just hope he'll be bolder next time! Of the 7 mentioned features 3-4 are not actually about the language but minor tooling hook ins (prettier, VSCode,) ... maybe that's the wrong focus.
Either way, the strong similarity with other JS/TS frameworks (semantics & syntax) suggests that for really new ideas the community should look elsewhere? Perhaps Clojurescript or Laravel (PhP) ...
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HTML is an implementation detail and JSX is a syntax for describing UI components. For example JSX can be reused across different contexts such as for React Mobile. It just so happens most usage of JSX is used to render HTML so it superficially appears to be writing HTML syntax. But I prefer JSX because it allows me to write UI HTML components as pure functions, without having to syntactically write out actual functions in whatever programming language I'm using.
I've never liked JSX, much prefering HTML like (Vue, Svelte), but I do like this template syntax. On reading it makes sense to me in a way that JSX never did, feeling squashed into the 'language'.
I love JSX and hate HTML template syntax, so there's at least one person.
What I like about JSX is that you can reuse all of the control flow primitives from JS. You have if, for, map, filter, flatMap, etc. if you want a new combinator, just write a function as you would for any other type of data transformation.
I consider this one of the biggest advantages of React compared to the approach of having separate templating and scripting languages.