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(Not familiar with Vue.) When you talk about "template syntax" and "directives and filters" are those a non-full-JS-style of templates? As in can you execute a

(Not familiar with Vue.) When you talk about "template syntax" and "directives and filters" are those a non-full-JS-style of templates? As in can you execute arbitrary JS like you can with JSX? Just curious. For me JSX is one of the biggest reasons that React is much, much better than Angular. I've found that once you get into re-implementing for loops, if statements, fallback defaults, etc., etc., for the sake of templating in an entirely new DSL, it becomes super complex and hard to learn/remember.

corford 9y ago
Vue lets you go the Angular route with templates or the React route (it supports JSX out of the box).
- ianstormtaylor 9y ago
  Which way are 90% of the Vue components, applications and examples written with?
  - corford 9y ago
    I think both ways are simple enough to grok it doesn't really matter and just comes down to personal/team preference (personally, I prefer JSX). The nice thing is Vue allows you a choice rather than making it dogma. As another commenter said, this can come in handy in certain situations (e.g. dealing with forms).
vec 9y ago
No, Vue's templates do not allow arbitrary JS. The syntax is very Angular-like, in the sense that everything is pseudo-html using custom tags and attributes. But the builtins are extremely well thought out and in practice I rarely find myself having to re-implement much of anything that's not application specific, and most of those things I'm grateful to implement once and be done with it instead of having to reimplement in JS for every component that needs it. There is more of a learning curve, in the sense that it only took me 1-2 hours to feel like I fully understood JSX and maybe a day and a half to feel like I fully understood Vue templates. I, personally, don't find that argument very compelling. ~10 dev hours is a rounding error over the lifetime of a project, and anyway I spent at least that much time researching and/or reinventing JSX conventions and idioms that are obvious or trivial in any real templating DSL. I only had to climb the conceptual hill once for each framework, and the view from the top is much nicer in Vue. As an aside, Vue actually supports JSX out of the box. Any component can optionally include a `render` function that's almost exactly like React's `render`, and it falls back to using Vue templates only if no `render` is specified. Anecdotally, though, there is only a single component in our entire application where the team decided it was cleaner in JSX than with a template.
- ianstormtaylor 9y ago
  The learning curve is only one place the choice ends up being worse. (Just read the Vue docs to understand.) The other is that you now have "directives" that are defined elsewhere, in other files, that are included into templates via strings, instead of anything that is easily statically (or quickly) analyzable. Some of these directives ship with core, but some are third-party, so you have to remember which is which, and which your team has added. But that's not it, those "directives" can have "modifiers" that can augment the already blackbox directives however they want. Not only that, but it seems that bindings can actually execute arbitrary Javascript as expressions. Which is great, except apparently you can do that in strings too, so you end up writing code like: <div v-bind:id="'list-' + id"></div> Now you're basically writing JSX, you're just doing it all inside of strings that are hard to lint, analyze, etc in the HTML attributes of your templates instead. It all adds up to lots of redirection and re-inventing the wheel, when you could just be using Javascript itself. (Although I'm sure there's _way_ less redirection than Angular.)
  - vec 9y ago
    > Some of these directives ship with core, but some are third-party, so you have to remember which is which, and which your team has added. Not to nitpick, but I think this might be the nut of our different reaction here. Some of our directive are core, and some are third-party. 99% of the time I don't have to know or care which is which. I just use them and they work and I don't have to think about how or why. Perhaps this would be clearer with an example. Our API serves numerous types of copy as markdown strings. In our React code, embedding a markdown string (assumed to be in `this.state.copy`) into a div looked like this: <div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{__html: md(this.state.copy)}} /> In Vue, it looks like this: <div v-md="copy" /> The first one is easier to statically analyze, but the second one is far easier for humans to read and to write. Vue allows me to abstract away all the details of how `copy` gets turned into HTML so that my templates can clearly express what I want them to do. The signal to noise ratio remains high, and if it starts to feel verbose or boilerplatey I have a large box of tools with which to fix it.
    - 9y ago

corford 9y ago

Vue lets you go the Angular route with templates or the React route (it supports JSX out of the box).

ianstormtaylor 9y ago
Which way are 90% of the Vue components, applications and examples written with?
- corford 9y ago
  I think both ways are simple enough to grok it doesn't really matter and just comes down to personal/team preference (personally, I prefer JSX). The nice thing is Vue allows you a choice rather than making it dogma. As another commenter said, this can come in handy in certain situations (e.g. dealing with forms).

vec 9y ago

No, Vue's templates do not allow arbitrary JS. The syntax is very Angular-like, in the sense that everything is pseudo-html using custom tags and attributes. But the builtins are extremely well thought out and in practice I rarely find myself having to re-implement much of anything that's not application specific, and most of those things I'm grateful to implement once and be done with it instead of having to reimplement in JS for every component that needs it. There is more of a learning curve, in the sense that it only took me 1-2 hours to feel like I fully understood JSX and maybe a day and a half to feel like I fully understood Vue templates. I, personally, don't find that argument very compelling. ~10 dev hours is a rounding error over the lifetime of a project, and anyway I spent at least that much time researching and/or reinventing JSX conventions and idioms that are obvious or trivial in any real templating DSL. I only had to climb the conceptual hill once for each framework, and the view from the top is much nicer in Vue. As an aside, Vue actually supports JSX out of the box. Any component can optionally include a `render` function that's almost exactly like React's `render`, and it falls back to using Vue templates only if no `render` is specified. Anecdotally, though, there is only a single component in our entire application where the team decided it was cleaner in JSX than with a template.

ianstormtaylor 9y ago
The learning curve is only one place the choice ends up being worse. (Just read the Vue docs to understand.) The other is that you now have "directives" that are defined elsewhere, in other files, that are included into templates via strings, instead of anything that is easily statically (or quickly) analyzable. Some of these directives ship with core, but some are third-party, so you have to remember which is which, and which your team has added. But that's not it, those "directives" can have "modifiers" that can augment the already blackbox directives however they want. Not only that, but it seems that bindings can actually execute arbitrary Javascript as expressions. Which is great, except apparently you can do that in strings too, so you end up writing code like: <div v-bind:id="'list-' + id"></div> Now you're basically writing JSX, you're just doing it all inside of strings that are hard to lint, analyze, etc in the HTML attributes of your templates instead. It all adds up to lots of redirection and re-inventing the wheel, when you could just be using Javascript itself. (Although I'm sure there's _way_ less redirection than Angular.)
- vec 9y ago
  > Some of these directives ship with core, but some are third-party, so you have to remember which is which, and which your team has added. Not to nitpick, but I think this might be the nut of our different reaction here. Some of our directive are core, and some are third-party. 99% of the time I don't have to know or care which is which. I just use them and they work and I don't have to think about how or why. Perhaps this would be clearer with an example. Our API serves numerous types of copy as markdown strings. In our React code, embedding a markdown string (assumed to be in `this.state.copy`) into a div looked like this: <div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{__html: md(this.state.copy)}} /> In Vue, it looks like this: <div v-md="copy" /> The first one is easier to statically analyze, but the second one is far easier for humans to read and to write. Vue allows me to abstract away all the details of how `copy` gets turned into HTML so that my templates can clearly express what I want them to do. The signal to noise ratio remains high, and if it starts to feel verbose or boilerplatey I have a large box of tools with which to fix it.
  - 9y ago