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Comment by TomMarius | Hacker News Reader

For example Angular templates, stuff like Razor in .NET, etc?

Perhaps I have missed the point, then. I see the same magnitude of departure of Razor from pure C#, QML from pure Qt C++, and JSX from pure DOM JS. All of the above move the developer from procedural native code, to declarative markup.

If the assertion is just that `var div = document.createElement('div')` is quite similar to `var div = React.createElement('div');` then of course I agree. In this sense, JSX+React is to DOM what XAML+WinForms is to win32. I had assumed we were discussing conceptual leap between native and framework-based UI implementations.

From a UI standpoint, it would be virtually just as hard for a JSX dev to implement a React app with purely `React.createElement()` as it would be to just write a native DOM application.

The point is that <Component prop={0} /> is equivalent to React.createElement(Component, {prop:0}, []) - it's a static, typed descriptor, and you imported the Component from somewhere because it's just another function/class. There is no such equivalence in magical templates of Angular or Razor - the JSX won't break as long as JavaScript can call functions, and will behave exactly in that way.

Yes, it's a move to declarative code from procedural one, that's right; what's important for my distinction is how is the move done. The question we're answering with React (as opposed to Vue, Angular, Razor...) is not declarative/procedural, but magical/not magical.

P.S. I heard that templates in Angular are not just templates anymore, they're converting them to function calls - I don't know the specifics, last Angular i saw was version 2.

> From a UI standpoint, it would be virtually just as hard for a JSX dev to implement a React app with purely `React.createElement()` as it would be to just write a native DOM application

I don't think that's true at all. I find react-hyperscript[0] and friends terser, more regular and just as easy to work with as JSX.

[0] https://github.com/mlmorg/react-hyperscript

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