[a_wild_dandan]

> Isn't React templating as well?

Nope! You can make React apps with just a plain ol' JS file (and doing so is frankly instructive). Most folk add in JSX for extra syntactic sugar tho, so the confusion with templating is understandable.

[xigency]

You can, but who does?

[shepherdjerred]

I think the point is that React is a true programming language with syntactic sugar to make it look templates, vs templates that bolt on some language.

[AtNightWeCode]

React is just JS as any other app using JS with templating. I really fail to see the benefit with the React approach. If anything it makes it more difficult to have a 100% match between design and the end product.

[shepherdjerred]

How much React have you written? Because React is just JavaScript, you can take traditional programming patterns and apply them to your UI, for example higher-order components. You can't do this with templating.

[pas]

Hm, can you describe what do you mean by "can't do this with templating"?

Do you mean that since React/JSX kind of a superset of JS you can do higher order stuff in it, whereas in a simple templating language like Jinja2 you can't?

Isn't that a false equivalence? I mean I regularly use patterns similar to HOCs in Angular. It's easy to wrap components[0] and it's just as possible to project components into other components programmatically[1] with complete dynamism.

[0] depending on the use case there are different preferred ways: directives, which have access to the wrapped component and its template, and can interact with it in many ways, or you can do it from raw TS ( https://github.com/abumuawiyah/ng-ivy/blob/master/src/app/ap... see the withTheme and withStyles functions )

[1] for simple things https://blog.angular-university.io/angular-ng-template-ng-co... ... see also the official working example from the docs https://stackblitz.com/edit/angular-568wsw?file=src/app/ad.s...

[shepherdjerred]

I wrote this on my phone. Hopefully it makes sense.

No templating language is going to beat a general purpose programming language as far as features go.

There’s no technical limitation of templated languages that would bar them from having the same functionality as a general purpose language. Whoever is designing the templated language is probably not going to design something as powerful as a general purpose language.

Angular built a specific set of keywords to include higher order components. React did no such thing — they exist for free because it’s all just JS. You could imagine that there are other patterns that exist in JS that you can’t express in Angular because it doesn’t have all of the flexibility of JS.

From your example you showed that you used TS to create your component, essentially using an escape hatch from Angulars templating language to do what you want. You don’t have to escape from React, because you’re already in JS.

I haven’t used Angular in a while, but I have been using Vue recently. The difference is huge. I can’t (easily) put a Vue component in a stack. I have to learn Vues syntax that will have zero transfer when I go to another framework, whereas React is just JavaScript (JSX does change some HTML attributes, but it is generally 1:1).

To close, I don’t think React is required to be productive or write good UI. I just really like it because there’s no magic going on. It’s just syntactic sugar over JS.

[fulafel]

People who use it from ClojureScript, for one. Due to the nicer Clojure syntax you don't need a templating language, just a data convention (hiccup in this case).

For those of us who hope JS will slowly become just a compile target, a downside of of JSX is that it's tooling is JS specific, and the syntax is tailored to JS. So it's great that React isn't married to JSX.

[samsquire]

I wrote a GUI framework that uses React API directly.

It's more proof of concept than useable, the idea is that we don't actually have to write layouts, we can just describe the layout with code or a template language and let the computer work it out.

https://github.com/samsquire/additive-guis

[Existenceblinks]

Yeah strangely it compiles to functions but they way they compose is not the way we compose function. Practically it's a template, compose via component mechanism. If it's a language it should be like Elm where attributes and children are also List and have return type, can be programed in function style.