[smt88]

> I wish a lot of the React conversation would focus in on WHY it is so popular even for apps it shouldn't be.

I didn't think this was a mystery. It's because a lot of devs are coming into the web ecosystem having primarily learned frameworks at boot camps (or on their own).

Most front-end devs that I've worked with who started in the last 5-10 years have such framework-specific knowledge that they can't really jump between frameworks or work on vanilla JS.

I'm not saying this is categorically bad. I use heavy abstractions on top of web languages (TypeScript, Webpack, Sass, Svelte) even for static sites, so I'm not arguing that they should be writing vanilla JS.

It's just interesting that JS is so flexible, and some of these abstractions are so strong, that you can learn something like React without really learning JS at all. It's like a DSL on top of JS.

[heavenlyblue]

JSX abstraction exists not because JS is so flexible but because it has a separate compiler for the code.

Otherwise if you don’t use JSX then you get something akin to programming with Ruby on Rails or Django - still quite integrated, but the syntax is familiar.

[smt88]

I actually didn't mean to include JSX in any of my comment. It is a DSL unquestionably.

I meant that the JS you write in React, Vue, and Svelte feels like a DSL.