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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

I’m always happy to see React alternatives but I’m not convinced HTML and CSS inside JavaScript was a good idea.

I tried reactivity once to help me understand the implementation details under the hood. I wrote https://fancy-pants.js.org/ for this where I attached mutation to scheduling a render cycle. But it doesn’t address rendering leaving that to the student.

Something that really fascinates me is the difference between diffing versus declaration of dynamic content. In React and Vue it is a runtime function to know what changed and how to apply it. In Ember and Svelte it is a compile time calculation based on markers in the template.

I guess it comes down to personal preference. I’m quite the fan of a declarative style template that gets converted/compiled to a machine under the hood instead of diffing at runtime.

Yeah the second I saw the string block I noped out. JSX works really nicely and I dislike weird template string stuff now. Same with vue.

No JSX for me either. I want plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. All scoped within their files and domains.

I’ve found this to be needless indirection.

If your components are large enough to warrant this simply break them down.

Just gotta write your CSS carefully. It's not easy, it takes time to learn, but so does the constant juggling that is the React world. At least the first one is faster and won't be out of fashion in 5 years, since it hasn't been in a decade.

I also find separation of concerns conceptually more sound and powerful.

React was created in 2013, so it has in fact been "in fashion" for a decade now.

Yeah, hopefully that trend is dying and we can get some sanity back.

Not at all, React is still a juggernaut and the industry standard. It is really, really good at what it does and other libraries are often riffs on its design philosophy. Even if React itself goes away for some reason, those patterns are here to stay since it has left a permanent mark on the field.

These complaints sound a bit like saying "man, compilers are so complicated, hopefully this trend is dying and we can get some sanity back."

It's an interesting comparison. An optimizing compiler is an incredibly complex beast that makes developer's life almost incalculably better. Most of our stack would be unfeasible to write and maintain in assembly. I'm not at all sold that React remotely qualifies, in fact, I've yet to see any benefits to developers or end users.

>it has left a permanent mark on the field

It sure has, an indelible stain

> Most of our stack would be unfeasible to write and maintain in assembly.

The same can be said about libraries like React and websites. Honestly, your position is completely untenable because it's the classic "everyone is dumb except me." Ah yes, all these million and billion dollar companies decided to use React because they're bored and not because it brings any value. You're the only genius, if only everyone realized that the Ideal Website was just handcrafted js.

There are thousands of websites written in React today, and they bring value to their users. That's not disputable. To suggest that there's no benefits is just an astounding level of arrogance.

I’m far from being the only one and it doesn’t take a genius to see that our industry is driven by far more than objective value returned to developer or end user.

Just do a quick search on HN, Twitter, Mastodon. You’ll see that’s actually not at all hard to find articles questioning its effectiveness.

The epiphany I had a few years ago is that React is very good for hiring, being hired, managing a team and has very little to do with writing and maintaining a website. At least that’s what I tell myself to find some peace. If you don’t think the JS world is mad, I don’t know if I can convince you in a HN thread.

It’s actually fine and great and decently performant for making web apps. Declarative code is much nicer than mutating the DOM, components are a great way to reuse code compositionally, hooks are nice building blocks for reusable logic within them. The JS world is indeed mad but that doesn’t mean React isn’t a highly pragmatic way of building GUI applications.

Just because style, logic, and result are logically grouped it doesn’t mean you’re losing “separation of concerns”. If in fact your definition of that is so shallow it amounts to simply having things in different files, you can do that anyway. It’s an organisational choice.

The alternative is a custom DSL for templating which I find much worse. Even CSS has a DSL for conditional and programmatic logic which I only use because of the immense performance benefits it brings.

Certainly not in the form of strings, no. That's a nightmare of run-time debugging just to make sure the tags are all closed and you have the correct attributes.

Perhaps pair it with a typescript library for composing it. There's nothing sacred about HTML for describing the DOM, but that it what it was created for, and the language the browser will report it.

That ship has sailed long ago!

It has not. I’m right here at land, don’t intend to go and there are dozens of us here :)

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