Making Dart a Better Language for UI

medium.com

7 points·childintime··4 comments

Interesting post. I know nothing of flutter or dart, but can sympathize with this problem. I’ve really grown fond of JSX, but I tend to have this lingering question about if s-expressions and lisps are the real panacea for writing UIs. I’ve been wanting to really dive into clojurescript for years. Do other people feel like lisps are exceptionally well suited for ui development?

no more or less in my opinion. The deciding factor is the design decisions by the author(s) of the UI framework. You can stack abstractions as high you wish in any language to get that lovely declarative feel, but how does it work in anger? is it still legible in a year's time? Is it still maintained? Can you go down the abstraction stack when you need to?

Javascript is a total fucking mess of bad programming decisions stacked on top of bad programmers and I would avoid writing a UI in it like the plague.

There may be something out there that lets you write, read, maintain and extend a UI that transpiles to Javascript. I've seen TeaVM in the news recently:

* http://teavm.org/

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19581788

I use Clojure + Swing with Seesaw myself.

* https://github.com/daveray/seesaw

I don't think how native or goodlooking a gui is has any bearing on it's UX.

Does Dart support templates like JSX for proper UI abstraction; the programmatic way to define UI trees is annoying as hell.

I wonder, did you perhaps not read the linked article? If so I must have misinterpeted you.

By my reading, its author seems to share your frustration and wrote the post to answer your question.

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