Comment by hathawsh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hathawsh | Hacker News Reader

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From my point of view, React brings two important ideas to web app development:

1. The virtual DOM. When I'm writing jQuery-based code, I have to write both a component template and code that updates the DOM in response to input; when I'm writing code for a virtual DOM, the component template is sufficient to update the DOM and I don't have to write that extra code, so there are fewer chances for bugs to creep in.

2. HTML-like syntax embedded in Javascript (JSX). I didn't like this at first until I configured Sublime Text to highlight embedded HTML correctly. Embedded HTML has pros and cons, but I think it's a net positive.

React projects also typically include new tech like ES2015, webpack, hot code reloading, and Redux with its time-traveling debugger. You can build your own stack that uses a virtual DOM library, embedded HTML, ES2015, and so on, but it's helpful to start with a common stack that many people understand. That's why React is interesting.

Just a note paraphrasing a Medium post that I encountered that extends point 2: it's a lot more robust to work with a framework that essentially puts HTML into Javascript rather than many alternatives, which essentially do the reverse. Javascript is a lot more complex than HTML, and yet most of the alternative JS frameworks attempt to compress some version of its logic into templating.

So we should throw away decades of practical experience in all the other platforms that this is a bad idea because some blog post said so?

Surely your decades of practical experience can instance an evidence-based response here.

Why the personal attack?

It's not a 'new' complaint about React, it's been said plenty of times, go do your own research.

Observing that your only point of evidence is your own unsubstantiated personal opinion is not the same thing as conducting a personal attack.

What other platforms embed a subset of a language into the templating one? I've only seen this done in HTML. Even "back then" I opted to use pure PHP for templates rather that trying to use some comment magic based DSL that does little more than variable replacement and a for loop. The templates in Angular for example are a good example of what is wrong with stuffing code into templates rather than going the other way around.

> I didn't like this at first until I configured Sublime Text to highlight embedded HTML correctly

Can you share your sublime settings or syntax configuration you are using?

I'm not the parent, but I wrote this [1] a year ago, and I think at least the first section still works for getting JSX syntax highlighting working.

[1]: http://petethompson.net/blog/js/2015/02/25/sublime-text-3-an...

I follow Dan Abramov's recommendations: https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/lint-like-it-s-2015-6987d44c...

If by virtual Dom you mean data binding, that's not a new concept, it's just not been client-side because JavaScript was too slow until recently.

Also data-binding brings its own myriad of problems that older programmers will know about from the days of desktop programming.

And 2 just sounds like a violation of the rule we've all learnt not to mix presentation and code.

So they're not reasons why React is interesting.

Perhaps you could elaborate on the myriad of problems with data-binding the prior generation has encountered, and how they are fixed or exacerbated by React's solution?

And with number 2, this is subjective, should a template be responsible for rendering it's children (necessitating the need for for loops)? Should it handle filtering in the case of tabulated data, in a way that is consistent and re-usable, or should this be another layer sat between model/controller and the view?

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