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Comment by mrspeaker | Hacker News Reader

Great article! I'm a fan of Elm - but I can't say I'm a fan of writing HTML like this: https://github.com/twopoint718/elmchat/blob/7ee097b937117cc6...

And that's pretty much the most simple component you could create. The author is determined to reach their 10,000 lines of elm: that'd just be like, 10 reasonably-complex components! ;) But that's just the HTML part of the pie... the actual code seems quite beautiful.

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Could you conceivably make a JSX preprocessor for Elm? Because this looks almost identical to how to do React components in CoffeeScript without JSX. And it's painful once you start getting to more than 1 level of nesting... it becomes impossible to tell, looking at a single line, whether something is meant to be an attribute or a nested component.

Moving to JSX is a godsend after that - it feels a bit odd, but once you realize that you're really writing HTML that you could always copy-paste into something-that's-not-React if you ever decided to move away from React, it's incredibly liberating.

There's this thread: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/elm-discuss/uXjcVyZ5... - but no other activity on a JSX preprocessor. Has anyone else been looking into this?

Yea... In theory it would be nice to have any DSL style created in the language, but in practice it seems easier to specifically build HTML-like syntax into the core language (like JSX). Or build a separate language like Haskell's Hamlet [1], or Python's Jinja [2].

[1] http://www.yesodweb.com/book/shakespearean-templates [2] http://jinja.pocoo.org/

Another approach is to invert the problem and use html web components - so declare new objects in html and separate the logic. That feels far more natural to me than an almost html (react) or some sort of dsl which shadows html mixing up logic, data and presentation - html is the one part of the web stack which is pretty much fit for purpose, why try to replace it?

See Polymer for an example of using this in current browsers:

https://www.polymer-project.org

The markup is just custom html elements separate from the behaviour (in js). e.g. a dialog:

https://elements.polymer-project.org/elements/paper-dialog?v...

    <paper-dialog>
      <h2>Header</h2>
      <paper-dialog-scrollable>
        Lorem ipsum...
      </paper-dialog-scrollable>
      <div class="buttons">
        <paper-button dialog-dismiss>Cancel</paper-button>
        <paper-button dialog-confirm>Accept</paper-button>
      </div>
    </paper-dialog>

Good point! I do really enjoy writing Angular templates. Embed the language in HTML, instead of the other way around. :D

As an aside, PyCharm is a great editor, it can understand Angular, HTML, CSS, and Jinja all in the same file, and does lots of helpful introspection for me. For example, I can command click any property to jump to it's definition, as well as syntax highlighting for all these languages.

clojurescript has lovely html syntax; it's probably my favourite to write. i generally prefer mlish to lispish syntax, but s-expressions fit the problem of representing a tree structure perfectly.

There's a proposal at the moment to reduce comma-noise a bit, which I think might help the situation if it's accepted: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm-discuss/PMGBcspBDiM/m6a3...

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