81–90 of 251 posts
Author uses a tone, terms and phrases (FOB) that are really off putting. It’s sad because the subject is interesting. Luckily this HN thread is great.
This article is weird linking together many unrelated strands of thought. Like linking reactive programming to “reactive” UIs, when really they mean UIs that are forgiving to their users instead of breaking down. Or how by coding on the web we’ve lost the immediacy of a UI that runs on our desktop, and the primitives (like undo/redo stacks) that make desktop user interfaces friendlier, at least without having to buil…
As someone who has admittedly worked on approximately 0 user-facing programs, it seems like there are not many revolutionary ideas when it comes UI. I have some dream of a sort of user-interface system that exposes controls and data more directly to the user, independent of the author's stylistic choices. Sort of like semantic HTML with style-sheets that are configured on a per-user basis. It would be analogous to th…
For UI, you also need to extend programming languages to add so "nested structure with logic" as first class (which is the real value of jsx, and could, I suppose, be trivially done in lisp ?)
I would love to have a Rust + Nested trees syntax + native UI lib that look decent on all system.
But it's never going to happen for now obvious reason, so, never mind.
> Crucially, none of the React alternatives solve this FFS. The context is the web, nobody solves graphic problem like gaming for you, or need to. At this point it doesn't matter because HTML/DOM stuff is not going to suffice what you are talking about either. I honestly think after reading 50% of the article is all about bragging knowing history. I'm not old but I was there too. WIN32, MFC, QT, 8086 assembly whateve…
> FFS. The context is the web, nobody solves graphic problem like gaming for you, or need to… I don’t think you understood the article. The point he was making is that a good user interface is hard to build and is “app like”, with all the weird edge cases. …and that, for better or worse: 1) react is the best at doing that. 2) react is (frustratingly) not making itself better at it, and is instead prioritising weird s…
I wanted to build browser app without DOM too, but this is what we have! People will complain about accessibility and all default behaviour goodness that will be thrown away.
I care, we have to start with the right basis which is not React's.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably getting upvoted based on the catchy title alone.
Can't wait for the "ok boomer" article refuting this rant.
> Now, before you close this tab thinking "ugh, not another tech rant", let me first remind you that a post is not a rant simply because it makes you angry. Next, let me point out that I've been writing code for 32 years Well I closed that tab.
I still think plain old CSS - separate from any JS or HTML or JS that generates HTML - is the way to go.
Just so much easier and less brittle. I get that CSS being too hard for binary tree inverting geniuses to learn is now widely accepted folk wisdom, but it's really not true.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Isn't React templating as well? Nope! You can make React apps with just a plain ol' JS file (and doing so is frankly instructive). Most folk add in JSX for extra syntactic sugar tho, so the confusion with templating is understandable.
You can, but who does?
For those of us who hope JS will slowly become just a compile target, a downside of of JSX is that it's tooling is JS specific, and the syntax is tailored to JS. So it's great that React isn't married to JSX.
After going through the first two thirds of the article with mostly uninteresting "I'm old; I know better" detours, the author seems to sort of relate React to "reactive", and goes on yet another detour on unrelated architecture. So, we're now reaching the end of the article and the only conclusion we get is... hey, stuff is hard, you need to do the work, you can't avoid putting in effort. And... that's it. That's all there is to the article. Eh.