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> For example, XAML does an excellent job in declaring your UI. JSX does a better job. I hate XAML, it doesn't add anything except verbosity over just using C

> For example, XAML does an excellent job in declaring your UI. JSX does a better job. I hate XAML, it doesn't add anything except verbosity over just using C#. The original goal of XAML was to allow bindings to multiple programming languages and to allow designers to use a suite of amazing tools to finished designs off to developers for implementation. What ends up happening is developers write XAML, then they write C# to back up what XAML can't do, then they have a complex build stage to shove all this crap together, but instead of XAML just being transpiled to C# it has its own run time thing that hosts compiled XAML files. JSX by comparison is a trivial transformation to JavaScript. It is easy to read, and it does not try to replace JS control structures. In fact you could probably trivially transform a JSX syntax to ANY C type of language, I know there is a proposal (implementation?) for a JSX-like to Dart. The sheer awesomeness of JSX is hard to describe if you haven't used it. It is like something asked "what is the simplest, easiest to understand templating language we can possibly create?" and out popped JSX. My favorite part of JSX is how it doesn't try to have control structures in it. Everyone else gets this wrong and adds some sort of string types DSL to their templating language. JSX doesn't do that. If you want to map over an array and spit out a bunch of elements, you just do so in JavaScript/TypeScript.

TravHatesMe 7y ago
Interesting, I'll have to take a second look at JSX. So far I feel like in certain cases XML is better at declaring objects and their properties (along with their Types). XAML can declare any type and configure it as needed, it is a way of declaring components in a logical fashion. I wonder if JSX/alternatives are a true superset of XML-derived formats. FYI, XAML generates a binary format at compile-time. From my many experiences with desktop applications, the additional code for XAML/UI is required regardless of the languages/frameworks, to control things like animations, behaviors, markup extensions.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > XAML can declare any type and configure it as needed, it is a way of declaring components in a logical fashion. XAML is a lot like Python object constructor syntax with all named parameters except one positional parameter that is a list of child objects (obviously, explicit closing tags rather than a closing square bracket and paren is a difference, but structurally it's m almost identical.) It's certainly a convenience for declaring certain kinds of object trees, especially if your main programming language doesn't have a similarly succinct object construction syntax. JSX is effectively a way of adding an equivalent object constructions syntax to the host (JS) language, rather than requiring it to be in separate code files.

TravHatesMe 7y ago

Interesting, I'll have to take a second look at JSX. So far I feel like in certain cases XML is better at declaring objects and their properties (along with their Types). XAML can declare any type and configure it as needed, it is a way of declaring components in a logical fashion. I wonder if JSX/alternatives are a true superset of XML-derived formats. FYI, XAML generates a binary format at compile-time. From my many experiences with desktop applications, the additional code for XAML/UI is required regardless of the languages/frameworks, to control things like animations, behaviors, markup extensions.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> XAML can declare any type and configure it as needed, it is a way of declaring components in a logical fashion. XAML is a lot like Python object constructor syntax with all named parameters except one positional parameter that is a list of child objects (obviously, explicit closing tags rather than a closing square bracket and paren is a difference, but structurally it's m almost identical.) It's certainly a convenience for declaring certain kinds of object trees, especially if your main programming language doesn't have a similarly succinct object construction syntax. JSX is effectively a way of adding an equivalent object constructions syntax to the host (JS) language, rather than requiring it to be in separate code files.