Comment by throwaway1851 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway1851 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t come from a JS background, and JS makes me very angry every time I use it. But it’s unavoidable if you want to build something on the web. I tried to pick up React a few years ago for a project, saw the JSX, and put it right back down. At the time, Vue’s emphasis on HTML templates was comforting and approachable, since I like HTML and its simplicity and visual structure. So I tried Vue, and found it was easy to go from toy examples to real, working projects with no major gotchas.

I recently spent some time learning Vue 3, and I’m a little less enamored. The composition API is nice for not requiring deeply nested code inside a giant object literal. But having my code littered with .value is ugly and a source of endless bugs. (You also don’t always need .value, such as when referencing a Pinia store. Ugh.) I looked into the pending “Reactivity Transform”, but it too introduces weird surprises and seems like its issues may be unsolvable.

Bottom line: I hope and pray for the day WASM allows Python to get a decent footing in the browser environment.

Python is the last thing you want in the browser. The sooner everyone's love affair with Python ends the better.

Python has its flaws (package management and the GIL come to mind). But the language itself is just beautiful, and _designed_. It makes it so many common tasks expressible in compact, readable code. I’d be willing to jump through some hoops to use it on the front and back.

What do you dislike about JSX? It's just a tree of function calls.

Just the visual appearance. It’s so chaotic. I’m sure it’s very powerful, and that’s why people like it. I just don’t have a very high tolerance for clutter.

It looks almost exactly like HTML though? The only difference is wrapping curly brackets around expressions. I admit that if you embed long expressions directly in the JSX it can chaotic, but I tend to assign these expressions to variables first, then put the variable in the JSX. Or break it up into another component.

I don’t think it does when the markup you’re generating gets more complex. At least, not compared to Vue templates.

What I like about Vue is that you can work up a static design, then cut and paste chunks into single file components, add in a few :attr=“someVar” bindings, some handlebars, and you’re done with the template part. You can also copy and paste and rearrange the markup very easily. It’s a nice workflow and it makes it easy to see and manipulate the structure of the markup without having to think about the JS too much.

I imagine if you enjoy writing JS, then it makes sense to make everything a function and do it all in JS.

> I’m sure it’s very powerful

JSX is only appealing to a webdev community. Modern native react-like UI libraries are perfectly fine without XML-like syntaxes: Flutter[1], Jetpack Compose[2], SwiftUI[3].

1. https://flutter.dev/

2. https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose

3. https://developer.apple.com/xcode/swiftui/

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