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Comment by greggh | Hacker News Reader

This looks like the framework I've been waiting for. Remember when you could create web pages in a simple text editor without 10+ tools, command lines, config files and languages? That's before you get into transpiling and everything else I hate about the world today.

Maybe I'm sitting here saying something that sounds like "get off my lawn" to everyone else in the thread, but this thing is amazing.

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I know exactly where you are coming from, so let me save you the hassle

  npm install -g create-react-app
  create-react-app my-app
  cd my-app/
  npm start

type unknown.variable in various files and see how they handle it - there should be a (compile time) stack trace that points you exactly to the right file and line.

That alone changes everything about JS.

react is literally the opposite of what the parent described. It's a huge convoluted ecosystem that requires many new tools to use effectively and almost everything in the stack is complex to learn.

compare to something like https://github.com/yoshuawuyts/choo which is actually tiny and simple

> react is literally the opposite of what the parent described. It's a huge convoluted ecosystem (...)

React is not an ecosystem. React is a library with an extremely simple API. Everyone acts like one must use a flux implementation, a complicated router and everything when you use React. It can't be farther from the truth. Out of the box, React also provides, more or less, whatever cell provides.

An entire DSL to describe the DOM is not a simple API. React is nice, but its API is at best easy as opposed to hard, not simple as opposed to complex.

I agree this is great, but the fun part is that the dynamic language advocates first claims dynamic languages is the shit, then they build the tools to mimic staticly typed languages ;)

(True; staticly typed isnt the same as not declared, but still, i think you get my point.)

Actually, typescript was built by a quite famous static typing advocate.

Honest question: what's stopping you from writing HTML and JavaScript in a simple text editor today?

It's easy to write a basic web app in one .html file with whatever JS you need inside <script> tags.

You can even do React with JSX this way (but please still build for production systems): https://gist.github.com/guscost/27736c5f0913184695492ac40fd3...

In my experience, this kind of minimalism is great on paper, but in practice if you throw out at least some of that complexity, you also have to rewrite so many things yourself. Sometimes that's a good thing but some features are too complex to get right every time and it's worth reusing a good quality version of them, which unfortunately sometimes requires using a bunch of questionably designed build/dev tools.

You can still do that. Just last week I hacked together a quite useable web page using simple HTML and a few <?php-snippets to make it useable :) Don't need JS for everything.

But then you need php on the server, don't you?

This is literally a self-contained file...

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