Hacker News Reader

It's optional, and also not optional. Nobody is using React without JSX in practice, because it's ugly and verbose.

Not true, without JSX, React is basically Mithril, if you alias React.createElement to a short function name.

Yeah, and I'm arguing that it's pretty ugly to write nested html that way.

Hater-or-lover of JSX, it is definitely an intuitive way to think about HTML in the context of JS.

I prefer the vue model that's a bit closer to the metal, though, if only because of quirks like className

Think I see what you are getting at--in practice most folks using React are going to use JSX and build tools, and if you alias the function it's kind of non-standard.

Mithril has "class" instead of "className"; that irks me too.

And vue optionally supports Jsx, so original comment or using it as a reason why ‘react sucks’ is being super pandentic. It’s ok to have multiple frameworks!

Optional features contribute to a tool's complexity, especially when every single example assumes you are using said optional feature.

And <Foo bar={'hi!'} /> is the same as Foo({ bar: 'hi!' })