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React native and all these similar DSLs always seemed like a bad idea to me. I can forgive it on the web as you have no other choice than to use the 3 broken pi

React native and all these similar DSLs always seemed like a bad idea to me. I can forgive it on the web as you have no other choice than to use the 3 broken pillars which is html, css, and js and build your sand castles on top of that. I wonder though, was the development of swift UI influenced by the abundance of react developers or is this what peak UI development looks like?. In the history of GUI applications does react represent the best we have managed to come up with?. I've used it as to me it kinda sucks but I have never worked on the UI side of anything except for small web frontends I always just assumed that in the 40+ years there were some better UI libraries but apparently not?.

deergomoo 3y ago
The main benefit of declarative UI frameworks is that they remove the need to manually reconcile changes in state with changes in the representation of that state (with the caveat that it often becomes difficult to do so if the DSL doesn’t cover the behaviour you want). UIs inherently have a hell of a lot of state that is constantly in flux, so it can become very difficult to manage those transitions correctly and efficiently. By providing a description of how an interface should look given some program state, the developer only need be concerned with the flow of data, and the framework can automatically create and apply the delta to update the UI in the most efficient way. For example, there’s no possibility to forget to re-enable a button in that rarely-used code path, because the “enabled” state is derived from the rest of your app state and any changes to that automatically cascade downwards. I’m not saying these things are a silver bullet (and I don’t even really do much UI stuff anymore), but when my job involved frontend web stuff, moving from jQuery to Vue was both an unbelievable jump in both productivity and a massive decrease in UI bugs (and LoC!).
- benatkin 3y ago
  DSL stands for Domain Specific Language, not declarative. It is possible to be declarative without a hybrid DSL like JSX. Angular is declarative, but it doesn't mix html structures and js in the same way.
  - jb1991 3y ago
    I wonder if you responded to the wrong comment.
    - benatkin 3y ago
      It's the one I intended to respond to. React isn't declarative in a new way. Backbone.js popularized declarative event bindings long before it. It is a bit of a unique DSL though.
      - jb1991 3y ago
        It was odd because the comment you were responding to does not make the point that you seem to be debating against.
madeofpalk 3y ago
> In the history of GUI applications does react represent the best we have managed to come up with tl;dr, yes. Ignore the DSL syntax of React (or SwiftUI or whatever), and understand that React's model is that UI is a function of state. In my experience, being able to declare how your application should look given it's current state (and just let the engine figure out how to get there) is a significantly more productive. This works very well with React on the Web because the primitives there are pretty basic, and there's a well understood way to break out back down to the imperative DOM APIs. Others (SwiftUI, WinUI XAML from my experience) haven't quite seem to have gotten the mix right yet, so you have a harder time once you need to do more complicated things. SwiftUI (like React Web) has some really neat benefits from this - views can be serialized down and rendered without your application running. This is how lock+home screen widgets, and watch complications work - the app is intermittently asked to provide snapshots at certain points in time, which the OS serializes and shows later. This is easily possible with SwiftUI because it fundamentally is data.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
I suspect it would be influenced more by QML than React. Why jump to the conclusion that it's React?

deergomoo 3y ago

The main benefit of declarative UI frameworks is that they remove the need to manually reconcile changes in state with changes in the representation of that state (with the caveat that it often becomes difficult to do so if the DSL doesn’t cover the behaviour you want). UIs inherently have a hell of a lot of state that is constantly in flux, so it can become very difficult to manage those transitions correctly and efficiently. By providing a description of how an interface should look given some program state, the developer only need be concerned with the flow of data, and the framework can automatically create and apply the delta to update the UI in the most efficient way. For example, there’s no possibility to forget to re-enable a button in that rarely-used code path, because the “enabled” state is derived from the rest of your app state and any changes to that automatically cascade downwards. I’m not saying these things are a silver bullet (and I don’t even really do much UI stuff anymore), but when my job involved frontend web stuff, moving from jQuery to Vue was both an unbelievable jump in both productivity and a massive decrease in UI bugs (and LoC!).

benatkin 3y ago
DSL stands for Domain Specific Language, not declarative. It is possible to be declarative without a hybrid DSL like JSX. Angular is declarative, but it doesn't mix html structures and js in the same way.
- jb1991 3y ago
  I wonder if you responded to the wrong comment.
  - benatkin 3y ago
    It's the one I intended to respond to. React isn't declarative in a new way. Backbone.js popularized declarative event bindings long before it. It is a bit of a unique DSL though.
    - jb1991 3y ago
      It was odd because the comment you were responding to does not make the point that you seem to be debating against.

madeofpalk 3y ago

> In the history of GUI applications does react represent the best we have managed to come up with tl;dr, yes. Ignore the DSL syntax of React (or SwiftUI or whatever), and understand that React's model is that UI is a function of state. In my experience, being able to declare how your application should look given it's current state (and just let the engine figure out how to get there) is a significantly more productive. This works very well with React on the Web because the primitives there are pretty basic, and there's a well understood way to break out back down to the imperative DOM APIs. Others (SwiftUI, WinUI XAML from my experience) haven't quite seem to have gotten the mix right yet, so you have a harder time once you need to do more complicated things. SwiftUI (like React Web) has some really neat benefits from this - views can be serialized down and rendered without your application running. This is how lock+home screen widgets, and watch complications work - the app is intermittently asked to provide snapshots at certain points in time, which the OS serializes and shows later. This is easily possible with SwiftUI because it fundamentally is data.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

I suspect it would be influenced more by QML than React. Why jump to the conclusion that it's React?