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JSX is no longer my friend

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Re: JSX is no longer my friend

#91

Post by couchand »

ricardobeat wrote: post #35
formula1 wrote: post #32

Notably we must first understand that there is a differemce between react as a framework and jsx. Jsx provides a means to generate ui patches which in turn resolve to html through react. What makes jsx so great is that it looks like html so you dont have to think in some special library way. Your using pre-existing technologies which is wonderful. A more important point is the handlebars. So, handlebars implys block…

The "handlebars" are just plain javascript syntax for a block, not template markers. You can try it in your browser console. { console.log(123); }

Not exactly... within JSX the handlebars signify "now I'm going back to plain JS".

compare

    
        console.log(123)
with

    
        { console.log(123) }
The first outputs a div with the text "console.log(123)" inside. The second logs "123" and outputs an empty div (since console.log returns undefined).

Re: JSX is no longer my friend

#92

Post by couchand »

formula1 wrote: post #32

Notably we must first understand that there is a differemce between react as a framework and jsx. Jsx provides a means to generate ui patches which in turn resolve to html through react. What makes jsx so great is that it looks like html so you dont have to think in some special library way. Your using pre-existing technologies which is wonderful. A more important point is the handlebars. So, handlebars implys block…

Not exactly. The stuff within the handlebars isn't evaluated, it's just passed through as code rather than a string. Your example is equivalent to this:

    React.createElement(div, { count: count?true:false })
not, as your comment implies,

    React.createElement(div, { count: true })

Re: JSX is no longer my friend

#93

Post by WesleyJohnson »

Perhaps not the best avenue for this, but I thought I'd take advantage of eyes on this discussion. How might I go about using JSX outside of React or creating something similar? I basically want to turn custom code into JavaScript that instantiates custom classes that have nothing to do with the DOM. I'd like to do this via a babel plugin as well.

If you can't tell, I enjoy JSX tremendously and I'd like to use it or borrow from it extensively outside of React.

Re: JSX is no longer my friend

#94

Post by drunkcatsdgaf »

WesleyJohnson wrote: post #93

Perhaps not the best avenue for this, but I thought I'd take advantage of eyes on this discussion. How might I go about using JSX outside of React or creating something similar? I basically want to turn custom code into JavaScript that instantiates custom classes that have nothing to do with the DOM. I'd like to do this via a babel plugin as well. If you can't tell, I enjoy JSX tremendously and I'd like to use it or…

https://github.com/abdmob/x2js

Re: JSX is no longer my friend

#95

Post by matt4077 »

csense wrote: post #41

I was nodding and agreeing right up until he got to the part where he was talking about how he's using Hyperscript as a replacement. Hyperscript's just the same problematic design with a different syntax. Mixing HTML and server side code may let you do toy projects quickly, but in the real world it's a great recipe for building an unmaintainable, undifferentiated, monolithic mess.

So how exactly do I specify the place where I'd like if I can't do some variation of {date}?

Re: JSX is no longer my friend

#96

Post by rubber_duck »

couchand wrote: post #88
bicknergseng wrote: post #34

This needs to be prefaced: this argument is overdone. JSX is not hard to learn. It's an order of magnitude better than the hampered DSLs of handlebars or dust, and I'm concerned that any engineer is so scarred that learning it takes more than 5-10 minutes of RTFM. After all, TFM on JSX is all of 200 words or less [1]. I've been using JSX since React 0.4. React's greatest strength is its simplicity. You can read all o…

I've also been using JSX since the good old days, when a component was just a function -- "hyperscript" (such as it is) was built right in. Notably, writing React apps in CoffeeScript was beautiful: div className: "greeting" "Hello, world!" As you pointed out, the biggest problem with JSX is not that it isn't JS, it's that it isn't HTML. It's a leaky abstraction. Camel casing is only the most obvious problem, things…

JSX always felt hacky - the cleanest thing I've seen in this area is ClojureScript and Reagent. And that goes for the whole React stack - it just feels like it was made in a wrong language - even the surrounding stuff like Redux.

Every single concept they hacked on to JS (immutable types, atom, declarative DSL, etc.) is a first class concept in CLJS - and it works beautifully even when building on top of their JS implementation - I feel sad they didn't just go "all in" on something like CLJS - they have more than enough resources to fix any implementation issues (ie. they have the resources to create a compiler that would generate code you would hand write with immutable.js and JSX - after all they are funding stuff like Flux and babel).

I understand why they didn't do it but it still feels so bad to see a hack in a place where a beautiful solution was just a step away.

Re: JSX is no longer my friend

#97

Post by wwwigham »

A long time ago I tossed together a template-language DSL of my own[1] when a bunch of my friends complained that there were "too many choices" and that "we should just use plain JS and HTML without a complicated framework" (I feel like this tagline gets used by many newer 'microframeworks').

Sometimes you just don't want to RTFM, and so you get to enjoy the standards problem[2] rather than learning someone else's tool. Sometimes you just have a lot of spare time and want to re-implement something as a learning experience. But it's a good idea to acknowledge the technical merits of those who've come before when you want to go down that route - JSX is a _well done_ project. If you don't learn from it's good parts (familiarity, ease of use, prolific tooling), as well as the bad you feel you see, you don't get anywhere. The author became familiar with JSX to the point where his perspective of its benefits and flaws shifted - after using it for a long time you can forget its benefits until you no longer have them.

For example, I would argue that the contextual switching the author complains about is a _good_ thing - I find the extra hesitation helps you create boundaries and keep unneeded code out of your views.

[1]http://ham.io/not.js/ [2]https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: JSX is no longer my friend

#98

Post by pka »

rubber_duck wrote: post #96
couchand wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also been using JSX since the good old days, when a component was just a function -- "hyperscript" (such as it is) was built right in. Notably, writing React apps in CoffeeScript was beautiful: div className: "greeting" "Hello, world!" As you pointed out, the biggest problem with JSX is not that it isn't JS, it's that it isn't HTML. It's a leaky abstraction. Camel casing is only the most obvious problem, things…

JSX always felt hacky - the cleanest thing I've seen in this area is ClojureScript and Reagent. And that goes for the whole React stack - it just feels like it was made in a wrong language - even the surrounding stuff like Redux. Every single concept they hacked on to JS (immutable types, atom, declarative DSL, etc.) is a first class concept in CLJS - and it works beautifully even when building on top of their JS imp…

Or even more beautiful - purescript-thermite. But just as js people are scared of Clojure, Clojure people are scared of Haskell :)

(it's a joke)

Re: JSX is no longer my friend

#99

Post by matt4077 »

Mizza wrote: post #12

Finally, somebody said it. I thought we abandoned that garbage when we left PHP, and now all of a sudden everybody wants to start mixing markup and code again?

There's no escaping the fact that when you have an array of objects, you're going to loop over them to generate html. At that points, it's idiotic to learn some contrived new templating language when you already have .map.

Seriously: Separation of Concerns is solved. Yes, you were once far ahead of the pack. But at some point _everybody got it_. It no longer needs a (cumbersome) technical solution because we solved it with education, and developers have been highly disciplines since almost the late 90ies.

Re: JSX is no longer my friend

#100

Post by sdegutis »

pka wrote: post #98
rubber_duck wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JSX always felt hacky - the cleanest thing I've seen in this area is ClojureScript and Reagent. And that goes for the whole React stack - it just feels like it was made in a wrong language - even the surrounding stuff like Redux. Every single concept they hacked on to JS (immutable types, atom, declarative DSL, etc.) is a first class concept in CLJS - and it works beautifully even when building on top of their JS imp…

Or even more beautiful - purescript-thermite. But just as js people are scared of Clojure, Clojure people are scared of Haskell :) (it's a joke)

I've been a Clojure dev full time for a few years, and last year I looked into Haskell quite a bit [1]. But ultimately the fact that Clojure can do live-programming is what really kept me preferring Clojure. And I'm not even talking about that figwheel stuff. I mean just being able to mess around inside the JVM live from an Emacs buffer via Cider, and reloading parts of my code while my app is still running during development. I'm not interested in giving that up, it's made me more productive than I thought I could ever be.

[1]: http://sdegutis.github.io/

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