Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 571 posts

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#321

Post by winphone1974 »

d23 wrote: post #186
cphoover wrote: post #182

I'm tired of having to learn yet another templating language without a very compelling reason. Why do I have to learn, what is essentially, a new programming language for each of these frameworks (Angular, Svelte, Vue, React... Do I really need to learn yet another language construct for stuff like `loops`, `if/else`, event handlers...etc. Why must all of these frameworks re-invent the wheel? At least with React it i…

As a backend guy who moved away from frontend long ago for these very reasons, I have to ask: why are people downvoting this? Is it wrong? I'm genuinely asking, because from a bystander's point of view, it certainly seems like the pattern of the Framework Du Jour hasn't really slowed down much in the frontend community.

I assume because there's no value to it. What's the opposite side of the argument? You have an area with a lot of growth and many problems with the way we're solving these problems and something like svelte is not"completely reinventing the wheel" as the OP positions it, by nature it's try to solve specific problems using our existing tooling whenever possible. The original post is a shallow, feel-good rant

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#322

Post by enumjorge »

sholladay wrote: post #315

Rich Harris has done a lot of great work. Until esbuild came along, Rollup was the only sane JS bundler for those of us who can’t stand Webpack. Svelte has some interesting concepts, albeit I am planning to stay with React. His code is always interesting to read. Then there’s Vercel. I was a big advocate for them years ago, back when they were Zeit. I used them in production at multiple companies and I contributed to…

Maybe I'm misreading your comment, but Richard Harris did not create esbuild. Evan Wallace, co-founder of Figma, is the person behind it.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#323

Post by ricardobeat »

Ambroos wrote: post #253
DonHopkins wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And JSX isn't JavaScript and it isn't HTML, and if you know JavaScript and HTML you still don't know JSX, so you're still using "yet another language" in addition to JavaScript and HTML.

JSX is easy to summarize as: HTML where everything in curly brackets is a JS expression that gets evaluated. There are some additions (prop spreading) and restrictions (curly brackets apply to whole attribute values and element bodies only), but they're very simple.

And custom event handling attributes, camel casing, special cases like htmlFor and className, non-standard attributes being ignored except for custom elements, the style attribute, the special case of checked/selected properties vs attrs for form elements, key and ref properties. Plus all the semantics of component updates, memoizing and so on.

This is already far more to learn than the handful of simple control structures Svelte introduces.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#324

Post by fendy3002 »

d23 wrote: post #186
cphoover wrote: post #182

I'm tired of having to learn yet another templating language without a very compelling reason. Why do I have to learn, what is essentially, a new programming language for each of these frameworks (Angular, Svelte, Vue, React... Do I really need to learn yet another language construct for stuff like `loops`, `if/else`, event handlers...etc. Why must all of these frameworks re-invent the wheel? At least with React it i…

As a backend guy who moved away from frontend long ago for these very reasons, I have to ask: why are people downvoting this? Is it wrong? I'm genuinely asking, because from a bystander's point of view, it certainly seems like the pattern of the Framework Du Jour hasn't really slowed down much in the frontend community.

I've used react for some years now and it's very very hard to do animation and event-driven operations with pure react render. You'll need extensive lifecycle events or hooks and refs to get animation or handle focus, etc well. It's due to how react render the components.

It doesn't make react bad but I guess some newer frameworks (vue, svelte, I haven't learned those yet) try to tackle this from different approach.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#325

Post by [deleted] »

benmccann wrote: post #259
cphoover wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What how can you say that??? {myItems.map({id, title}) => {title} } vs... svelte {#each myItems as item} {item.title} {/each} One is literally just javascript and html the other is an entirely different template language. You might say... JSX is not HTML... well it's very very similar... If you know HTML you JSX is very intuitive.

But React isn't just JSX. It's also the entire runtime library, hooks, event handling, forms, state handling, etc. The example you shared is a bit too simple to understand where Svelte shines because it doesn't introduce any of those concerns. By having it's own templating language, Svelte is able to compile the templates to JavaScript in a way that addresses many of those concerns in a way that I think it easier to…

[deleted]

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#326

Post by winphone1974 »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #295
mikewhy wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frontend developers like to change frameworks every week it seems like This sentiment is so old and played out.

Is it false though? If it’s true, then maybe we need to look at why it’s true. It’s not just front end developers though. I think other domains and their frameworks went through the same thing. This is just the time for front end.

Why is no complaining that there more than one way to build a php app? Perhaps because like JS it's a huge ecosystem with a giant user base and millions of use cases. Front end dev has lots of room to support the dozen or so mainstream frameworks we've used over the past decade-plus

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#327

Post by winphone1974 »

spoils19 wrote: post #307
vosper wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, and it’s nice to see this worn-out trope getting downvoted for once. Sneering at JS / Frontend developers is one of the more distasteful tendencies of HN.

Probably because it's an entire industry that is self-sustaining, without really a reason for it to exist. Most software can be built with regular HTML / JS / CSS without some convoluted framework. Even better, let's make a desktop application (when was the last time we had those?!), and we can get all kinds of performance and security gains without having to tack everything on to the web as a platform.

The "just build a desktop app" trope is even more played out.

Plus you know all these front end frameworks are "just HTML/ JS/CSS" right?

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#328

Post by chrbp »

midrus wrote: post #191
solarmist wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bits were misdirected? What worries did you have?

The complexity and the over engineering going on, mostly. Things such as redux, rxjs, observables, thunks, etc really put me off when you compare that to just MVC with Rails for example, plus most applications I worked with React were just forms anyway, with some fancy controls/widgets on top. Not having a clear way, even today with Next, to load data (client side, without doing SSR) before a route transition happens…

I don't agree that everything has to revolve around MVC. It's not a hammer for every problem. This is why other patterns like MVVM, MVP and other abbreviations were introduced to solve broader needs.

React starting as purely a UI library paved the way for people to find new ways to manage state and data for different kinds of applications and needs. That's how we ended up with what we have today. You can say what you wan't, but I think it's remarkable what people came up with in the past 10 years.

And these solutions are just optional things you can choose in case you have a need for them. React comes with a lot of things for building rich UI. Sure some things may require more code, but so is the nature of writing applications with specific requirements.

Server components, Concurrent Mode and Suspense came out of the frustrations that it was hard to provide great user experience and avoid common pitfalls with async I/O and high performance because they were limited by React. The solutions they came up with, while not perfect (or even ready yet) aims to solve these issues, while avoiding breaking backwards compatibility and that could be further improved upon while also avoiding breaking the API.

With regards to hooks, I agree that it can be annoying to have to manually pass dependencies. But this is unfortunately the nature of JavaScript and React's mission to not break things. The alternative would require massively changing the API. We've seen other attempts at remedying this with projects like CrankJS and SolidJS that takes a clean slate, preserving the concept of React, but taking a more modern approach on these concepts, as they have freedom of designing their own API from scratch.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#329

Post by uallo »

cphoover wrote: post #231
RoboticWater wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the use cases I deal with on a regular basis, Svelte looks more like vanilla HTML/JS than any equivalent React code. And the reason these things change is because that's what needed changing . One of the topline features of Svelte is that is has less boilerplate than React, and it achieves that quite handily. Unless you're criticizing particular constructs in Svelte that are unjustifiably different, I don't t…

What how can you say that??? {myItems.map({id, title}) => {title} } vs... svelte {#each myItems as item} {item.title} {/each} One is literally just javascript and html the other is an entirely different template language. You might say... JSX is not HTML... well it's very very similar... If you know HTML you JSX is very intuitive.

> literally just javascript

Repeating it over and over again does not make it true.

https://linkedlist.ch/jsx_is_not_just_javascript_39/

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#330

Post by joppy »

cphoover wrote: post #182

I'm tired of having to learn yet another templating language without a very compelling reason. Why do I have to learn, what is essentially, a new programming language for each of these frameworks (Angular, Svelte, Vue, React... Do I really need to learn yet another language construct for stuff like `loops`, `if/else`, event handlers...etc. Why must all of these frameworks re-invent the wheel? At least with React it i…

Because Svelte can look through the template, and at compile-time determine exactly which parts of the output need to be "surgically updated" in the DOM when some of the inputs change, without needing any runtime like a virtual DOM implementation. I don't know how you could implement such a thing (with good ergonomics) without a template language.
Post reply on HN