Has anyone else made the switch from JSX to hyperscript? JSX works well enough, but I love the consistency and composability of building views with plain old functions and data structures.
JSX in detail
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Re: JSX in detail
#12Has anyone else made the switch from JSX to hyperscript? JSX works well enough, but I love the consistency and composability of building views with plain old functions and data structures.
JSX is just 'plain old functions' - just with some syntactic sugar on top to make it a bit easier to write. In fact, JSX compiles down to functions looking very similar to hyperscript...
Re: JSX in detail
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
In LISP based languages like ClojureScript, macros are part of the language. No need to build tools like JSX (that requires to run on webpack + IDE tooling etc...).
I could be wrong, but I don't think a LISP macro can transform the structure of the code in the same way that the JSX pragma turns an XML tree "inside-out". For example here's the source for the Babel JSX transformer: https://github.com/babel/babel/blob/master/packages/babel-pl...
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Re: JSX in detail
#14Experimenting with JSX has introduced me to two language constructs: the Pragma, and the Macro. I know that these might seem a bit pedestrian to most folks, but they opened up my understanding of programming languages considerably. I am genuinely a bit surprised that the Javascript community hasn't played around more with the possibilities that both can offer.
In LISP based languages like ClojureScript, macros are part of the language. No need to build tools like JSX (that requires to run on webpack + IDE tooling etc...).
In Lisp, if you created something like JSX, your IDE or text editor would still be unlikely to understand it, as it'd be a very complicated reader macro. It doesn't magically solve all macro problems.
Doing it the Lispy way, though, you'd likely use sexprs directly, with maybe some normal macros, so you wouldn't have HTML-like syntax but would have something that worked nicely in your editor.
Re: JSX in detail
#15Has anyone else made the switch from JSX to hyperscript? JSX works well enough, but I love the consistency and composability of building views with plain old functions and data structures.
I switched the other way, as JSX fixed the main problem I've had for years using "hyperscript" (or DOM builders, as we used to say). Its comma-free syntax sugar for function calls, element lists and attribute objects makes it so much easier to write and maintain.
Re: JSX in detail
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
In LISP based languages like ClojureScript, macros are part of the language. No need to build tools like JSX (that requires to run on webpack + IDE tooling etc...).
I could be wrong, but I don't think a LISP macro can transform the structure of the code in the same way that the JSX pragma turns an XML tree "inside-out". For example here's the source for the Babel JSX transformer: https://github.com/babel/babel/blob/master/packages/babel-pl...
The usual macros in Lisp get all of the code as data, making rearrangement of the tree fairly trivial. For syntax changes, you'd use reader macros, which essentially involve writing a parser for all the parts that aren't Lisp. Once that's done, which is non-trivial, you would again have a tree to rearrange as you saw fit.
However, you'd be very unlikely to make something as syntactically heavy as JSX in Lisp. Lisp ethos is to keep the syntax as simple as possible, so it stays out of the way.
Re: JSX in detail
#17Experimenting with JSX has introduced me to two language constructs: the Pragma, and the Macro. I know that these might seem a bit pedestrian to most folks, but they opened up my understanding of programming languages considerably. I am genuinely a bit surprised that the Javascript community hasn't played around more with the possibilities that both can offer.
Here you got me interested in this post hoping it would use JSX to introduce Pragma's and Macro's, turns out it just reiterates what JSX compiles down to...
Re: JSX in detail
#18Experimenting with JSX has introduced me to two language constructs: the Pragma, and the Macro. I know that these might seem a bit pedestrian to most folks, but they opened up my understanding of programming languages considerably. I am genuinely a bit surprised that the Javascript community hasn't played around more with the possibilities that both can offer.
I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to by macros. A container for boilerplate code to avoid repetition, as in templating languages? If so, the React solution would probably be extracting a simple component which just provides markup.
Re: JSX in detail
#19Hyperscript markup looks like a nice replacement for JSX. The source for hyperscript-react is 50 lines of code, including comments and empty lines, so it's fairly easy to learn:
https://github.com/mlmorg/react-hyperscript/blob/master/inde...
Re: JSX in detail
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
JSX could be language-integrated (witness the now-deprecated E4X for XML literals in Javascript), it just is not. And most lisps don't have unfettered reader macros which would allow embedding macros using non-lisp syntax (aka JSX). A macroed JSX wouldn't make much sense in Lisps really, and AFAIK isn't used with most clojurescript vdoms using either hiccup structures or regular function calls.
who needs JSX when you have hiccup!
Possibly a more uniform treatment of components versus "literal elements", but yeah the value proposition becomes very low.
In fact I'd argue the value proposition of JSX is already relatively low when you factor in hyperscript in regular javascript (and yes there are component-compatible hyperscript helpers for React).