Comment by coding123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coding123 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm actually really excited about Angular "2+" for something you've expressed here. I know that a React developer won't see this the same way, but I really feel like it's come down (for me at least) to either Angular "2+" or React - and whatever the reason someone is going to be on one side of the fence or the other. I've written smallish to largish programs in Vue, React, Ember, Polymer - and in all of those cases tried, wherever possible to do so in RXJS and Typescript. When everything else shakes out, I'm finding that nothing is coming close to the RXJS and Typescript combination "sweet spot". There have been various attempts to make a lot of the other frameworks "typescript friendly" but it's just nowhere near.

So why is Rx and Typescript so important to me? Well specifically those two are kind of like the drug that once you try them, you literally can't go back. I've been wanting this level of type checking for 10 years on the front end. I am not willing to lose it now. As for Rx, it's the one true way to do async flows. Promises and Callbacks just end up creating large pyramidic code.

I think Typescript can sometime have a mind of its own, but it's certainly an enrichment and with Rx everything just falls into place.

At this point it's hard to ignore that all the UI libraries are just paradigms and patterns, and how we use them is getting less important. These days I just want to write Component-style UI code, and I'll be fine.

Similarl things can be said about RxJS, but I think since it's a different level of abstraction, it will hit much harder, once it gains more traction. And it's already building up a solid community much faster than before. the only thing standing in the way of people learning RxJS is the same as Angular / Vue / React. It's scary and there's a lot of fatigue still. I hope that this year is thus going to be even better for teaching. ^^

Tldr; RxJS is going to be huge, if we can teach it more and JS fatigue calms down.

We've got some really cool ideas to make Rx really first class in Angular. It's already pretty deeply integrated, but with a little work, it'll be awesome.

What are they? I've been developing with the @ngrx suite, and it's been mostly pretty smooth, what more do you want? I would like to see a piece of documentation that lays out explicitly what happens when you pass around Observables. Hot ones, cold ones, when the auto-unsubscribe clicks in, whether

    this.property$ = some_observable();
    this.property$.subscribe(fn);

... will auto-unsubscribe (does it? who knows... try it?), what happens when you async pipe and its interaction with ChangeDetection...

definitely agreed! It's become one of the biggest "advocators", so to speak. But I think people will want to learn it as a default, async primitive in JS as promises now are. Not saying support from Angular and other projects and also companies doesn't help, since it makes it look less like a "scary, new thing", but I think more people should start to teach it's benefits to be frank and blunt about it ;)

absolutely. we're 100% invested in Rx, and more than anything else I'd like to see the Observable type standardized.

Cyclejs currently seems to be the only sane observable/typescript based framework to me.

Didn't GWT provide you with type checking on the frontend 10 years back ?

Still works, incidentally.

Yep, I realized and regretted saying that after I posted that - there certainly are typed languages on the front end, but at some point or another they are all very disconnected from Javascript itself. I feel with Typescript you get both a user-configurable level of type checking combined with the cowboy coder flexibility of Javascript - I guess that's what I was aiming to say. Whether that's a good thing to others is up to them however. ;)

Yep. It was horrible to use, but it had type checking, sure. So did Objective-J, from around the same time period, fwiw.

If you are Java heavy, GWT is still a great option. It is extremely mature and can do pretty much everything you want to do.

I'm glad to hear that there are some mature options out there.

You should probably check out CycleJs. Rx like and TypeScript.

How does RxJS solve the problem of virtual DOM?

By itself it doesn't really have anything to do with it; they're solutions to completely different problems. (That said, I'm not quite sure what you mean by the "problem" of virtual DOM?)

What _is_ interesting, though, is having your virtual DOM be the output of a reactive stream, and having a virtual DOM library use that to update the actual DOM. This is the approach Cycle.js takes: https://cycle.js.org/

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