> React's solution reads like a bad joke.

Uh... what solution, and in what way? React doesn't use "two-way binding", at least not in the sense that other frameworks do.

If you're talking about the idea of "controlled inputs", it fits with the rest of the React philosophy. Driving input values from state keeps the data flow predictable, and makes it easier to implement things like validation.

I've got a number of articles on React form management in my React/Redux links list ([0]). In particular, Gosha Arinich's article on the basics of controlled inputs is excellent ([1]), as is Loren Stewart's article ([2]).

[0] https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links/blob/master...

[1] http://goshakkk.name/controlled-vs-uncontrolled-inputs-react...

[2] http://lorenstewart.me/2016/10/31/react-js-forms-controlled-...

Three unofficial links with each containing more content than the whole official vue.js guide on input binding. And we are talking about a very common feature a lot of users desire.

I guess I just don't fancy the "react philosophy", which is perfectly fine: I am happy we each got what we want.

If it's the official docs you're looking for, here you go: https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/forms.html .

My guess based on a few minutes of googling to explain the popularity of Vue: unhappy Angular 1 users (with Angular 2 being too different/complex/...?).

As I'm currently very happy with React I know too little about them, so correct me please.

This is just anecdotal, but I've never used Angular. I tried using React a few times but kept stopping since I didn't have enough time to get all the toolchain pieces installed and working together. Then I started hearing about vue so I tried learning it by dropping the vue.js file into the html page and it just worked.

> I didn't have enough time to get all the toolchain pieces installed and working together

You mean "babel --presets react src > out.js"?

The problem here is people keep comparing the React ecosystem to the Vue library.

> babel --presets react src > out.js

That is not a realistic workflow anyone would ever use.

We're sitting on several hundreds (yes, hundreds) "real world" apps and you can bet your butt that some of them do just that.

The more advanced ones use the whole tool chain. Simple ones are just a silly 1 liner script like that. Some don't use JSX at all and just straight up stick React on a page. It all works just peachy.

I'm sorry, what? A "compile" step is something nobody would ever do? Are you writing a lot of machine code these days?

Superficially angular 1 and vue are very similar, so you might be on to something. But that's something great: There is a reason why angular 1 was widely adopted insanely fast. It's great to have a high performance replacement for it that is still under active development.

> Can you do proper react without studying a node.js Package manager, bundler, compiler, JSX?

Yes. React is just a view rendering library. All those tools are just to make your life easier (including JSX) and don't have any inherent connection to React.

> Google "vue two way binding input" and "react two way input binding". React's solution reads like a bad joke."

Sure, but that's because "two way binding" isn't really Reactive. I guess it depends on what your past experience is, but as far as API surface area React and Vue seem to have similar complexity.

Is React without JSX really something anyone would use though? All the examples are in JSX. Do you have the same first class experience?

> isn't really Reactive.

The go to response of react users when confronted with "I want to do X, why can't I do X?". It might makes sense for you but it pushes a lot of developers away.

I use React without JSX. With CoffeeScript it the render function is nice an concise, and I can use all the regular goodies of a proper programming language.

Granted most of the components/UIs are simple, but it works.

Would you say vue.js is the next evolutionary step after jQuery?

Who am I to make such a grand judgement?

I am not even a frontend developer!

I think it's possible, but at the moment the vue.js usage share is still FAR to small. One of my countries job search platform offers 89 jQuery jobs, 46 angular (1+2), 28 angular2, 28 for react. 1 (one) for vue. (To put this in perspective, 643 Java jobs).