[hosh]

Here's another comment from that reddit thread:

"If you're at all familiar with the history of React, there's actually some amount of truth to this. React grew out of an internal PHP extension at Facebook called XHP. See the recent post describing React's history at https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/09/28/our-first-5... for more details."

"That said, the parallels only go so far. PHP is frequently rather unstructured, while React lends itself to some very specific structures. I don't think I'd necessarily say that PHP typically involves "recursively breaking down parts of the page". But sure, some similarities. (Then again, just about anything that involves template-ish work has some similarities... )"

[tptacek]

That blog post section describes JSX, not React. JSX is just a notation.