[drunknhik]

My only point in mentioning apollo-tools is that DSLs are very powerful, and have the potential to make complex problems much simpler. SDL is a great example of is, as are vue templates. You may not appreciate the DSL, but, believe me, there are a lot of people who much prefer it. I'm specifically calling out designer type folks here.

> I love how you could find exactly one thing out of a whole list of things that may be just ever so slightly better than JSX.

It's not a question of "better" or "worse". It's a question of tradeoffs on spectrum of abstraction.

I'm not here to bash JSX or react. But you apparently are, and I'm just trying to open your eyes a bit.

When vue came out with JSX, I tried to force it on my team, and there are a serious backlash, to the point where I came to realization that the vue's major strength is actually the templates, and the magic.

You may not like the magic, but a lot of folks do.

As for your specific questions

@ and : are just short hands. That's like saying: what's the difference between `map` vs `reduce` in my component to iterate over an array. They _can_ do the same thing, but map is shorter. In plain JS I can do `i = i + i` `i += i` or `i++` to increment an variable.

@ just means "event handler". @click = "onClick" : just means "use a dynamic value for this prop { } you can put any JS expression, with the plus that you don't have to litter your code with `this`.

[dmitriid]

Additionally:

> with the plus that you don't have to litter your code with `this`.

"Littering code with this" is exactly how plain old vanilla JS works. Besides, "littering your code with this" very much depends on where your callbacks and variables come from... as in any old plain vanilla Javascript code. Because JSX is a paper-thin DSL on top of vanilla JS. Brilliantly and succintly described in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17474370

In Vue you don't litter your code with this. You litter your code with hoisted variables and functions that are arbitarily hoisted into scope and injected everywhere. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17471199 starting at "Of course. See inline comments."

The amount of gotchas and special syntaxes, and special cases, and the amount of moving part you have to understand to see where things come from and go to in Vue is insurmountably larger than in JSX.

[dmitriid]

> My only point in mentioning apollo-tools is that DSLs are very powerful, and have the potential to make complex problems much simpler.

Yes. But just because it has that potential, doesn't mean that Vue's DSL(s) are not without the many problems anf gotchas I described. Just because Apollo's/GraphQL's DSL is potentially good, doesn't mean that Vue's is. etc.

> It's not a question of "better" or "worse". It's a question of tradeoffs on spectrum of abstraction. > I'm not here to bash JSX or react. But you apparently are, and I'm just trying to open your eyes a bit.

My eyes are wide open. Where in JSX I see a uniform approach that works in all JSX contexts, in Vue I see several DSLs bound together by magic of the library.

> @ and : are just short hands. That's like saying: what's the difference between `map` vs `reduce`

Shorthands mean:

- new syntax. For all intents and purposes it's a new syntax (call it a DSL syntax). And you have to know the difference and gotchas of that syntax. You have to know where you can:

-- provide a thing that looks like a function ref

-- provide a thing that looks like a function call

-- provide a thing that looks like a bound variable

-- provide a thing that looks like a Javascript expression

etc. etc. etc.

And that is further compounded by the fact that `v-` attributes sometimes take single Javascript-like expressions, sometimes not (v-for), some have additional "arguments". some have additional modifiers etc. etc.

And of course, some of it is Javascript expressions inside strings (`v-` attributes), some of it is Javascript-like (but not really Javascript) DSL inside mustache's curly braces (inside tags).

So here's the original statement that started this thread: "The amount of special cases in Vue templating syntax is comparable to the special cases and gotchas of JSX"

This is demonstrably provably patently not so, as this thread has demonstrated.