Comment by vec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vec | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not the author, but that quote lines up almost exactly with our experience.

First, Vue shares most of the things that actually make React exciting. Component oriented, one-way databinding, virtual DOM, a first party Flux-inspired state management plugin. We didn't feel that we lost anything moving from React to Vue, and most of our existing components were trivial to port.

What we gained, on the other hand, is a whole lot of developer comfort. Vue's template syntax can be read and manipulated by people who aren't primarily Javascript developers. Directives and filters eliminate quite a bit of boilerplate. Opt-in two way binding eliminates noisy setter functions without any loss of clarity. Getters enable the use of computed values as though they were raw data. There's no single killer feature, but taken together Vue just feels much more pleasant to use than React.

React has the correct fundamental abstraction, but the actual API mistakes "small" for "simple". JSX, in particular, is trivial to explain and understand in theory, but in practice is often quite verbose and complex to use, as everyone who has asked themselves "how do I actually write an if/else block" has discovered to their dismay. Vue plux Vuex keeps the same conceptual simplicity and cleanliness as React, but it pairs it with a much larger, much more opinionated API that doesn't force us to reinvent every wheel we need.

(Not familiar with Vue.)

When you talk about "template syntax" and "directives and filters" are those a non-full-JS-style of templates? As in can you execute arbitrary JS like you can with JSX? Just curious.

For me JSX is one of the biggest reasons that React is much, much better than Angular. I've found that once you get into re-implementing for loops, if statements, fallback defaults, etc., etc., for the sake of templating in an entirely new DSL, it becomes super complex and hard to learn/remember.

Vue lets you go the Angular route with templates or the React route (it supports JSX out of the box).

Which way are 90% of the Vue components, applications and examples written with?

I think both ways are simple enough to grok it doesn't really matter and just comes down to personal/team preference (personally, I prefer JSX).

The nice thing is Vue allows you a choice rather than making it dogma. As another commenter said, this can come in handy in certain situations (e.g. dealing with forms).

No, Vue's templates do not allow arbitrary JS. The syntax is very Angular-like, in the sense that everything is pseudo-html using custom tags and attributes. But the builtins are extremely well thought out and in practice I rarely find myself having to re-implement much of anything that's not application specific, and most of those things I'm grateful to implement once and be done with it instead of having to reimplement in JS for every component that needs it.

There is more of a learning curve, in the sense that it only took me 1-2 hours to feel like I fully understood JSX and maybe a day and a half to feel like I fully understood Vue templates. I, personally, don't find that argument very compelling. ~10 dev hours is a rounding error over the lifetime of a project, and anyway I spent at least that much time researching and/or reinventing JSX conventions and idioms that are obvious or trivial in any real templating DSL. I only had to climb the conceptual hill once for each framework, and the view from the top is much nicer in Vue.

As an aside, Vue actually supports JSX out of the box. Any component can optionally include a `render` function that's almost exactly like React's `render`, and it falls back to using Vue templates only if no `render` is specified. Anecdotally, though, there is only a single component in our entire application where the team decided it was cleaner in JSX than with a template.

The learning curve is only one place the choice ends up being worse. (Just read the Vue docs to understand.)

The other is that you now have "directives" that are defined elsewhere, in other files, that are included into templates via strings, instead of anything that is easily statically (or quickly) analyzable. Some of these directives ship with core, but some are third-party, so you have to remember which is which, and which your team has added.

But that's not it, those "directives" can have "modifiers" that can augment the already blackbox directives however they want.

Not only that, but it seems that bindings can actually execute arbitrary Javascript as expressions. Which is great, except apparently you can do that in strings too, so you end up writing code like:

    <div v-bind:id="'list-' + id"></div>

Now you're basically writing JSX, you're just doing it all inside of strings that are hard to lint, analyze, etc in the HTML attributes of your templates instead.

It all adds up to lots of redirection and re-inventing the wheel, when you could just be using Javascript itself. (Although I'm sure there's _way_ less redirection than Angular.)

> Some of these directives ship with core, but some are third-party, so you have to remember which is which, and which your team has added.

Not to nitpick, but I think this might be the nut of our different reaction here. Some of our directive are core, and some are third-party. 99% of the time I don't have to know or care which is which. I just use them and they work and I don't have to think about how or why.

Perhaps this would be clearer with an example. Our API serves numerous types of copy as markdown strings. In our React code, embedding a markdown string (assumed to be in `this.state.copy`) into a div looked like this:

    <div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{__html: md(this.state.copy)}} />

In Vue, it looks like this:

    <div v-md="copy" />

The first one is easier to statically analyze, but the second one is far easier for humans to read and to write. Vue allows me to abstract away all the details of how `copy` gets turned into HTML so that my templates can clearly express what I want them to do. The signal to noise ratio remains high, and if it starts to feel verbose or boilerplatey I have a large box of tools with which to fix it.

Static analysis aside, the first snippet using the React API is very much designed to be used sparingly. I feel It's a bit of an unfair comparison to take an escape hatch that's intentionally verbose and indicative of "dangerously using strings directly" and judge it based on its convenience...

Maybe you're hitting a pathological use-case because of the nature of your API. In which case you can always wrap it inside a single function and just do `<MyMarkdown text={bla} />`

I did choose a pathological case, partly because there's no way to write the `md` helper function in a way that react will just treat as always safe, other than wrapping it a component. But then components requires a single root element and unless I want it to always be a div I also have to pass in a tag name and this is rapidly ceasing to feel simple.

But it's not just contrived examples. Here's a list:

    <ul>
      {(this.state.items || []).map(item => (
        <li>{item}</li>
      ))}
    </ul>

vs

    <ul>
      <li v-for="item in items">{item}</li>
    </ul>

And here's a simple if/else

    let loginOrLogout
    if (this.isLoggedIn()) {
      loginOrLogout = <LogoutButton />
    } else {
      loginOrLogout = <LoginForm />
    }

    // snip

    <div>{loginOrLogout}</div>

vs

    <div>
      <logout-button v-if="isLoggedIn" />
      <login-form v-else />
    </div>

React is conceptually simple, but that often forces me to write complex code. Vue lets me keep the code I write (i.e. the only code I actually care about) simple.

If you haven't watched it before, I'd recommend "Simple Made Easy" by Rich Hickey. [0]

The reason I say that is because you say "conceptually simple" as if that's a bad thing. Maybe we have to agree to disagree, but in choosing a framework I would much, much rather go for the one that is conceptually simple (at the cost of some extra verbosity in certain cases) over one that is conceptually complex but covers up that complexity with a terse-but-incomplete API.

You're not going to understand the benefits of the Vue vs. React choice by looking at idealized code samples, which is all your comment is showing. You'll only know it once you get into the edge cases. For example for list iteration in Vue...

- ...how do you change that example to omit the last item?

- ...how do you change that example to render a different element for every other item?

- ...how do you render something different if there are no items?

That's what makes the JSX approach simple. Once you understand that you can use any Javascript expression you want, you don't need to learn further. All of those questions can be guesstimated by a newcomer.

But with Vue you have to learn each and every "directive" and "modifier", and consult the docs again each time you forget them.

[0]: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

The funny thing is Vue templates just compile down to something similar to JSX. It's just object construction.

Just how Vue has JSX support I'm sure react could add template support. I personally wouldn't want anything to do with it as I find JSX a lot easier to work with but it wouldn't be that hard to do.

You don't mention mobx. If you haven't used it, you ought want to give it a look and reconsider your opinion

I enjoy mobx a lot, but I don't think it really address most of the points vec raised.

The way I look at it, it's not a contest. If Vue is better for some developers and some teams than React, that's great! It's nice to have multiple good tools to choose from.

According to https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison.html , vuejs is less verbose React + Mobx.

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