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Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

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Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#21

Post by oorza »

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.

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 robust type system in the world with no qualifiers. And it might not even try to be sound. And it might disappear at compile time. But none of that changes the fact that it took a bunch of concepts that only programming language dorks knew or cared about and turned them into every day utilities that the junior most developers use. And it doesn't change the fact that it is the only mainstream programming language with a fully Turing complete type system.

Give credit where it's due. I say all of this as one of the aforementioned programming language dorks who took a really long time to get on board with TS, as I thought Flow's focus on purity made it a better choice.

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#23

Post by bcherny »

Ink is awesome, but it does have some rough edges. For example, want to absolutely position something on screen? Not possible. The UI also tends to flicker when you’re doing anything complicated, in a way that can be hard to debug.

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#24

Post by EddieRingle »

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.

They're building a product that revolves around React and Typescript and include an email specifically for receiving investors, so it's reasonable that they'd talk up both technologies.

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#25

Post by oscb »

I like Ink as an idea for how to use React creatively. It’s very well done. At the same I think most CLIs do not need this kind of interaction. It is better to keep them simple and verbose rather than fancy and obscured. I spent a long time removing Ink from an enterprise tool where it didn’t fit as it was meant more for CI/CD. Not this tools fault of course.

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#26

Post by hombre_fatal »

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.

What makes React great is that you write a UI tree that updates when state changes instead of imperative code like a clearRect() + drawLine() cycle.

This project and others like React Native show that it works outside of the DOM: you just render something else instead.

Thinking that React is only helpful for DOM UI seems like a misunderstanding of what React is and what makes it great.

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#27

Post by hajile »

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…

Some people here seem to have a hard time understanding that React !== DOM

React is descriptive. It creates a virtual tree and tells how that tree should be changed.

What that tree renders into is a completely different problem. On the web, it renders into HTML. On your phone (ReactNative), it renders into native GUI. In ink, it uses a render engine to concat and output the text results (it's a little more complex than that as it uses Yoga[0] today).

[0] https://www.yogalayout.dev/

Re: Ink: React for interactive CLI apps

#30

Post by dragonwriter »

oorza wrote: post #21
cupofjoakim wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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