Marko – A declarative, HTML‑based language (markojs.com)

> I already disliked that immensely in PHP. Not going back to that spaghetti mesh-up.

That looks like a pretty normal template to me and nothing like plain PHP templates? What do you mean by "spaghetti mesh-up"?

Oh wow! So I guess Marko has been around for while. Despite that, this is my first time hearing about it.

Someone posted here, thanks for that!! It immediately reminded me of HAML: https://harcstack.org/

I like HAML a lot, it was the most pleasant to develop with. And it shares a lot in common with Stylus. They both shared things in common.

NO NEED FOR: Curly braces, parentheses and semicolons. The cool thing, it was all optional and I wasn't forced to make use of all shortcuts!

I developed my own CSS Framework in 2003, shared with some UX guy at Yahoo, who incorporated it into YUI mostly as is, after I waived all rights. Most of that became internet standard. Later I had my own PHP based CSS scaffolding framework in 2005 that could also generate grids (before flex-box). SCASS/LESS was really similar to my framework, when it came out.

But I disliked it, it just looked like PHP mixed with CSS. I thought why accept the ugly syntax, despite a compiler being available?

The best ever existed is: HAML + Stylus + (HARC?)

See the beauty of it: https://stylus-lang.com/docs/selectors.html

Now compare with HAML https://haml.info/

I think https://harcstack.org/ makes a good successor.

vue allows other languages in .vue files for both css & html similar to js

JS inside HTML! Groundbreaking! It's nothing like Netscape ever conceived in 1995...

Why are you copy pasting the same comment, under different usernames everywhere?

React has a clear separation of concern? Excuse me? I only see do-it-all pre-styled components in the real world.

That’s interesting. I’ve always held SvelteKit in high regard for greenfield projects because it balances capability, developer experience, and performance, but I’ll have to give Marko a look. I’d love to see a similar deep dive into Electron style desktop frameworks since that space still feels underexplored compared to mobile. I honestly wouldn’t know where to start for a video game interface, and that bothers me.

I remain convinced that RSC and the SSR craze was a result of someone (or multiple) people needing a raise and their friends wanting to start a company selling abstract compute. Statically hydrated, minimal React was pretty great when served over good CDN infrastructure. Then I watched the bundle sizes and lock-in balloon. That second article is a dragon slayer. It really lays out the problem with React. In marrying itself to Next.js and embracing the server, it's betrayed the platform. Meanwhile, the platform itself has matured. React practically built my career, and I just don't have a reason to choose it anymore.

Let’s not pretend that useState() is plain TypeScript either. It’s a DSL in disguise.

JSX is amazing for stateless rendering of templates. Not so much for state management. That should really have been given a dedicated DSL. Here I think Marko did the right thing, why they then made even for-loops a dsl is more questionable.

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Some interesting context from the podcast:

> A lot of people are coming to eBay from a link that someone shared or from a search engine... This whole "amortized cost savings" you get from a Single-Page App (SPA) you don't necessarily get with eBay. Or people might go to eBay and open up ten [browser] tabs... If that's ten SPAs you're opening you're not really saving that much.

> At the same time in 2012 people are coming out with React, Angular... the question was "can we just use these tools?" and the answer was "kinda no"... Initially React was considered but the things we needed right out of the gate was streaming [sending as much HTML as... available without waiting for services responding with loaded data for the specific page]... With streaming you can send out stuff to the browser and have the browser [start] showing content to user without having to wait for your slowest service. At eBay there are a lot of services... Essentially if we were to adopt React or Angular the fact that there wasn't streaming would essentially mean that we're throwing away two seconds or so... which is not acceptable.

React has not been just JavaScript for a long time. The react DSL just keeps getting more and more bloated as they add more hooks for more and more edge cases (useFormStatus, useActionState, etc…). It’s becoming just another bloated mess now. And I used to love react! This looks promising though. The syntax looks very straightforward. Even though it’s not “just JavaScript” it is very easily understood by most programmers. I’ve glanced at it for all of 2 minutes and it all makes perfect sense. Functions look like functions. Variables look like variables. I think it looks cool!

Really, this point can't be stated often enough.

It was my reason for switching to React when I learned TypeScript after getting more into JS frameworks via Vue.JS.

My starting point was Vue 2.7, and I started out using string templates haha :)

Even wrote some reactive custom code (without Vue, just regular DOM code) in a customer widget that utilized Object.defineProperty et al, inspired by Vue.

And today, while I'm using React at $job, I also think Vue 3 is probably a solid framework as well.

Last time I checked, they improved on DX of their component and templating system. But I'm not even sure whether they still recommend the v-if etc helper tags.

For what it's worth, even Vue 2 always also supported JSX and later TSX

To each their own. This syntax actially resonates with some people, which is why template-based frameworks like Vue and Svelte are also popular. In fact, at first glance this reminds me a lot Vue in some of its approach and syntax.

BTW - with Vue you can use entirely JSX of you dislike HTML component syntax (I don’t know enough about Svelte to know if it allows the same).

In a past life we did try it... Marko has been around for years.

It started as a project at eBay and then got spun out to an open project around 2015

Do you really believe React is just javascript?

No Vue, is just JavaScript. React is JSX.

Agreed on the syntax part. We’ve had good syntax for templates before:

  <ul>
    {% for user in users %}
      <li>{{ user.firstName }}</li>
    {% endfor %}
  </ul>

And we have good syntax for templates now:

  <ul>
    {#each users as user}
      <li>{user.firstName}</li>
    {/each}
  </ul>

Why do we have to squish everything into HTML-like-but-not-quite blocks?

But no, JSX isn’t that great either:

  <ul>
    {users.map(user => (
      <li>{user.firstName}</li>
    ))}
  </ul>