no more or less in my opinion. The deciding factor is the design decisions by the author(s) of the UI framework. You can stack abstractions as high you wish in

no more or less in my opinion. The deciding factor is the design decisions by the author(s) of the UI framework. You can stack abstractions as high you wish in any language to get that lovely declarative feel, but how does it work in anger? is it still legible in a year's time? Is it still maintained? Can you go down the abstraction stack when you need to? Javascript is a total fucking mess of bad programming decisions stacked on top of bad programmers and I would avoid writing a UI in it like the plague. There may be something out there that lets you write, read, maintain and extend a UI that transpiles to Javascript. I've seen TeaVM in the news recently: * http://teavm.org/ http://teavm.org/ * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19581788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19581788 I use Clojure + Swing with Seesaw myself. * https://github.com/daveray/seesaw https://github.com/daveray/seesaw I don't think how native or goodlooking a gui is has any bearing on it's UX.