Solid stores are a great improvement over raw signals, but they still come with their own gotchas. First off, it's an entirely new syntax. You need to learn its documentation. You always have to use setStore, and it has a weird syntax like `setStore("users", 2, "loggedIn", false)` and even pushing items to an array is weird. In Gea it's just regular JavaScript: `this.users[2].loggedIn = false` or `this.users.push(...)`. MobX also comes with its own syntax.
In the end Gea is basically as simple as a plain old JavaScript class, made reactive by its compiler.
This is a design choice, and explained in their docs:
Separating the read and write capabilities of a store provides a valuable
debugging advantage.
This separation facilitates the tracking and control of the components that
are accessing or changing the values.
> You need to learn its documentation. You always have to use setStore, and it has a weird syntax like `setStore("users", 2, "loggedIn", false)` and even pushing items to an array is weird.
It's optional, and incidentally quite expressive and powerful. But they also support mutable drafts out of the box.
import { produce } from 'solid';
setStore(produce(state => {
state.users[2]?.loggedIn = false;
}))
I understand this bit. The bit that I don't understand is how you compare the two invented concepts like `setStore` and `produce` to just `state.users[2]?.loggedIn = false`. To me it's very clear Gea's syntax requires you to write less code, while also requiring you to know less concepts.
The value judgement implied in "invented concepts" is kind of weird, and maybe gets at a core difference in how you and I think about this.
Frameworks have APIs; they define concepts. Learning concepts isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Especially if they are concepts which let you model your application more succinctly and efficiently.
What you mean is that you are leaving it to the user to learn (or conceive of) additional concepts which are external to Gea to in order to build non-trivial reactive applications.
But "Gea requires you to write less code / know fewer concepts" can be reframed as "Gea opts out of solving some types of vanilla JS boilerplate for you". When you don't give your users "concepts", they're still going to end up writing a lot of code and learning concepts, just not within your API.
I see mpalmer counters each specific claim, dashersw shifts to a slightly different argument rather than directly addressing the rebuttal.
One guy is doing the tech founder equivalent of a TED Talk ("my thing is more native and requires fewer concepts!") while another is quietly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, and has receipts. One keeps doubling down because this is clearly his baby, while other is just some experienced dev who's watched too many "simple mutable state" frameworks turn into maintenance nightmares.
One person is selling a vision. The other is explaining why that vision has been tried and mostly rejected by the industry for good reasons.
Only one of them is learning from the conversation.
Thank you for the discussion, I find it very interesting and I'd love to understand how you think. Why do you think setStore and produce let you model your application more succinctly and efficiently than just a direct assignment?
And what kind of types of boilerplate do you see Gea is opting out of?
Let's briefly set aside your belief that because JS supports mutation, a framework should as well.
Immutability and one-way dataflow is an unquestionable productivity win. It eliminates an entire class of complexity, and results in well-defined boundaries for the components of your application. With two-way data binding, those boundaries have to be carefully recognized and preserved by the developer every time they touch the code.
So one place Gea won't save devs any time or grief is in testing. If any part of the app can affect any other part of the app, the surface area of a change very quickly becomes unknowable, and you are only as informed as your tests are thorough. Not boilerplate in the literal sense, but quite a bit of overhead in the form of combinatorial test cases.
Yes, JS has mutability. Yes, you can make two-way data binding work as a framework feature. That you should is an argument I don't think you've successfully made yet.
Let me ask - why do you think JSX lets you model your application more succinctly and efficiently than just a direct createElement call?
I see your point. I designed Gea to be one-way binding only first, and then decided to add two-way binding for props passed as objects. People can still easily only use one-way binding. Maybe this becomes a preference in the compiler config?
The argument for Gea to support two-way binding is basically circular and I believe well-made at this point. I want a framework to respect a language. Breaking two-way binding when it's a concept in the underlying language is like breaking Liskov's Substitution Principle. You can do it, but you probably shouldn't.
JSX is more succinct and efficient than raw DOM API because it's declarative, where the raw API is imperative.
In the end Gea is basically as simple as a plain old JavaScript class, made reactive by its compiler.