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Comment by gustix | Hacker News Reader

Alibaba is also working on a ReactNative competitor for Vue, called Weex: https://alibaba.github.io/weex/

we are using Weex for our app on production. Weex is pretty solid platform

Hey, can you tell us more? I'm very interested in Weex :) What make it solid ? what are the pros/cons ? Last time I checked I thought I need to know chinese as 95% of issues are in chinese for example. Is it still a prob ?

Hit the demos for Weex and compare them to Ionic 2. It's still day and night imho, whereas Ionic 2 looks very polished.

Can you be more explicit? I just want to make sure i understand you correctly. Do you believe Ionic 2 is better?

I'm looking at the demos now, but my main concern is how these behave on mobile apps. Performance, ease of development, etc. I have little concern for how they behave on my mac, fwiw. (performance on my mac may be related to mobile performance, but due to the very different architecture behind ReactNative style mobile apps, i'm skeptical to compare desktop performance)

Sorry, I actually thought Weex is another HTML5/Cordova thingy, but it appears to be more like React Native and calls native components. I have no experience with Weex running on the device. I just found the web demos unsatisfying.

> Last time I checked I thought I need to know chinese

Fascinating. This is probably the first time I've seen a huge open source project where a majority of the contributions are in a language that's not English. I've seen plenty of projects from non-native English speakers, but everything was still done in English.

I'm sure there are tons of other big projects in Chinese and other languages, but programming has always been very English-centric. I had heard of programming languages that use other languages or alphabets, but they were all very esoteric.

I've also seen people using foreign languages for class and method names, while all of the framework APIs and programming language keywords were English.

So I guess it's only fair that I should learn some Chinese. Weex does look very good.

I just looked at this issue, for example: https://github.com/alibaba/weex/issues/1746

It's funny how all of the Java variables and keywords, HTML tags, and the CSS is all English (or at least, programming languages based on English words), while the issue details are written in Chinese. It's a really interesting mix.

I wonder if there are transpilers that let people write code in their native language, and then convert everything into English source code. It should be very easy, it's just a search/replace for keywords like "public", "protected", "length", "super", "return", etc. etc.

Wikipedia has a list of programming languages written in other "human languages"[0], but they are pretty obscure for the most part.

At the end of the day, english has "won" as the language of keywords in programming. And while i'm glad that most newer languages have the ability to code everything but keywords in your native language (i've worked with JS that has variables and function names in other scripts), translating the keywords seems like a pointless process that would do nothing but cause incompatibility.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

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