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Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

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Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#31

Post by coffeemug »

cupofjoakim wrote: post #5

I get that there's a lot of people only comfortable in the js-landscape, but I still think this is a weird tool for the job. If performance is a concern there's no way node is the right thing to start, and react just seems silly to me here. Should be noted that I do a big portion of my day to day work in react - no hate on the framework.

Node/V8 is insanely fast. I never quite realized exactly how fast until I worked on this: https://www.spakhm.com/ts-wolfram-bench. It's mindblowing how fast it is.

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#32

Post by oorza »

dragonwriter wrote: post #30
oorza wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but ten years ago, if I told you the concept of a "bottom type" would be common knowledge with web developers or they'd consider type algebra second nature, you'd have laughed at me. If I were to tell you they pushed a Turing complete type system into the mainstream and then abused its computational power to do things like create value types, you'd ask me where I was buying my LSD. TS might not be the most robu…

> Sure, but ten years ago, if I told you the concept of a “bottom type” would be common knowledge with web developers or they’d consider type algebra second nature, you’d have laughed at me. If you told me that was the case today with web developers generally, I’d laugh at you even harder than I would have if you made that prediction ten years ago.

All the web developers I've worked with in the last four years understand the concept of a bottom type, even if they've never been introduced to the formal phrase, because `never` is the explicit bottom type in TS and appears all the time. You can't go very long consuming libraries written in TS before you run into it, at which point you become familiar with it.

Similarly, a function that accepts (explicitly) `A | B | (C & D)` and then dispatches to functions that accept `A | (C&D)` vs `B` is, you guessed it, type algebra and is a common pattern in hot paths through every TS codebase.

Just because the formal nomenclature is unknown does not mean the concepts are unfamiliar.

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#33

Post by emoII »

cupofjoakim wrote: post #17
seveibar wrote: post #12

Ink is great for CLI tools and enables really great tools. People who are saying React only belongs on DOM are missing out- React is the world's most popular and powerful declarative programming paradigm. It's being used for native apps, VR, 3d, CAD and electronics. React allows you to mix declarative and imperative programming concepts together in an effective way. To give a sense of why this is important: Imagine a…

> the most robust type-system in the world (Typescript) This is very high praise for something that only provides safety at compile time and not runtime.

Is there a type-system that provides runtime safety? I thought type-erasure was common practice

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#34

Post by phpnode »

cupofjoakim wrote: post #17
seveibar wrote: post #12

Ink is great for CLI tools and enables really great tools. People who are saying React only belongs on DOM are missing out- React is the world's most popular and powerful declarative programming paradigm. It's being used for native apps, VR, 3d, CAD and electronics. React allows you to mix declarative and imperative programming concepts together in an effective way. To give a sense of why this is important: Imagine a…

> the most robust type-system in the world (Typescript) This is very high praise for something that only provides safety at compile time and not runtime.

Out of all the type systems which provide safety at both compile time and run time, which are your favourites?

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#35

Post by dragonwriter »

seveibar wrote: post #12

Ink is great for CLI tools and enables really great tools. People who are saying React only belongs on DOM are missing out- React is the world's most popular and powerful declarative programming paradigm. It's being used for native apps, VR, 3d, CAD and electronics. React allows you to mix declarative and imperative programming concepts together in an effective way. To give a sense of why this is important: Imagine a…

> React allows you to mix declarative and imperative programming concepts together in an effective way. To give a sense of why this is important: Imagine a CLI built with XML.

Talk about a late-night-infomercial-level “let’s compare the thing we are talking up with the absolute worst alternative imaginable as if that was the next best choice” argument.

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#36

Post by bilater »

seveibar wrote: post #12

Ink is great for CLI tools and enables really great tools. People who are saying React only belongs on DOM are missing out- React is the world's most popular and powerful declarative programming paradigm. It's being used for native apps, VR, 3d, CAD and electronics. React allows you to mix declarative and imperative programming concepts together in an effective way. To give a sense of why this is important: Imagine a…

" People who are saying React only belongs on DOM are missing out"

yup - two of my favorite React packages are Remotion and React Email.

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#37

Post by result2vino »

seveibar wrote: post #12

Ink is great for CLI tools and enables really great tools. People who are saying React only belongs on DOM are missing out- React is the world's most popular and powerful declarative programming paradigm. It's being used for native apps, VR, 3d, CAD and electronics. React allows you to mix declarative and imperative programming concepts together in an effective way. To give a sense of why this is important: Imagine a…

I’m sitting here waiting for you to close the sale on me. Who said anything about XML as the alternative!?

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#38

Post by MrJohz »

slashdave wrote: post #10
cupofjoakim wrote: post #5

I get that there's a lot of people only comfortable in the js-landscape, but I still think this is a weird tool for the job. If performance is a concern there's no way node is the right thing to start, and react just seems silly to me here. Should be noted that I do a big portion of my day to day work in react - no hate on the framework.

Node.js is not necessarily bad, but React? What makes React great is the ability to embed the DOM in your app. For CLI? Square peg, round hole.

I'm not sure that's true. There's lots of ways to use and manipulate the DOM. But React is particularly special because it turns out to be a simpler way to think about UI components. A TUI has nothing to do with the DOM, but it's got a lot to do with rendering UI components. So taking the ideas from React and applying them to drawing elements in a terminal makes a lot of sense.

Arguably it makes even more sense than with React. One of the problems with React is that the underlying DOM is a stateful, imperative system, whereas React wants to behaves much more like an immediate-mode system, where the whole UI can be dropped and re-rendered at any time. But the terminal is not stateful like the DOM, and a more immediate-mode paradigm arguably works better in this context than in the browser.

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#39

Post by Etheryte »

cupofjoakim wrote: post #5

I get that there's a lot of people only comfortable in the js-landscape, but I still think this is a weird tool for the job. If performance is a concern there's no way node is the right thing to start, and react just seems silly to me here. Should be noted that I do a big portion of my day to day work in react - no hate on the framework.

For most apps, CLI or not, performance is not really a concern so long as it's good enough. Obsessing over performance before your program does The Thing is a great way to never actually get around to doing the useful bits. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying performance doesn't matter at all, but premature optimization and all its friends apply.

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#40

Post by seveibar »

dragonwriter wrote: post #35
seveibar wrote: post #12

Ink is great for CLI tools and enables really great tools. People who are saying React only belongs on DOM are missing out- React is the world's most popular and powerful declarative programming paradigm. It's being used for native apps, VR, 3d, CAD and electronics. React allows you to mix declarative and imperative programming concepts together in an effective way. To give a sense of why this is important: Imagine a…

> React allows you to mix declarative and imperative programming concepts together in an effective way. To give a sense of why this is important: Imagine a CLI built with XML. Talk about a late-night-infomercial-level “let’s compare the thing we are talking up with the absolute worst alternative imaginable as if that was the next best choice” argument.

Sorry, my point was to illustrate that XML is verbose so data-representation isn't a good fit. Most languages implement some kind of language-specific builder-pattern for CLIs, which in some sense is "re-inventing" a declarative programming paradigm for the domain-specific task. Could have done better w/ the example!
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