Earlier quoted context omitted.
JSX is not HTML. You are not writing HTML when you write JSX, you are writing Javascript. You are using a more convenient syntax to generate the virtual dom. All this hand wringing, navel gazing cargo-culting JSX gonna eat my baby bs is unnecessary. The PHP/html templating lessons of yonder simply does not apply.
> You are not writing HTML when you write JSX, you are writing Javascript. And why the hell you have to write code in JS that will be ultimately represented as HTML? Is it because it simplifies some processes for the React's VDOM implementation? Don't you make your life harder in order to make React's life easier? If you say it's because you get template code linted in the same way as a regular JS code, I say that ot…
The issue is that now you have a ton of code (it is code, btw) living in a templating language that probably doesn't have as good of debugging, documentation, performance, encapsulation, composition, etc. as the underlying language it's using to process the template. It's up to the maintainer of the templating system to handle re-implementing that, and if you end up in a situation where it doesn't actually meet your requirements, you either have to add these basic language features yourself or start from scratch.
That's why things like React and Hiccup (and even more advanced, something like Racket), etc. have gained huge popularity and mind share: instead of re-implementing the programming language in a template system to show HTML, let's implement an embedded DSL to conveniently write HTML.
Then suddenly we get away from managing gnarly data dependencies, stack traces through templating systems, and writing stuff like this:
{{%if medicare_eligible %}}
Here's some discounts!
{{% else %}}
You gotta pay full price
{{/if}}
// ...
templateSystem.create('template.hbs', { medicare_eligible: user.age >= 65 }
if (user.age >= 65) {
return Here's some discounts!
} else {
return You gotta pay full price!
}
Furthermore, by modeling your view as simple functions and data, you get all the features of data manipulation (huge productivity gain; don't need to write to rewrite or relearn `map`, `reduce`, `for`, serializing, etc.) and function composition (this is HUGE. I could write a whole blog post on this).