Show HN: Sapper.js – towards a better web app framework

Re:Show HN: Sapper.js – towards a better web app framework by aaron-lebo on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @03:29PM (#16055303)

Your comment expresses a really common sentiment, but it also vague and offers no supporting evidence.

When was a model like React + Redux (or Elm) used previously, and why did it fail? The combination of factors (browser advances and iteration on existing models) is unlike anything before. This tech stack did not exist in 1999, it did not exist in 2005, and it did not exist in 2012. It is driven by real problems.

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Re:Show HN: Sapper.js – towards a better web app framework by Silhouette on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @10:46PM (#16058179)

When was a model like React + Redux (or Elm) used previously, and why did it fail?

What do you mean "a model like React + Redux"?

Programmers have been separating underlying state, rendering and interactions since at least the earliest days of MVC in the '70s.

We've been diffing model states to identify changes to act on for as long as we've had explicit isolated state management, which again is several decades.

We've been identifying specific parts of a display to rerender fully because doing the whole thing was too expensive since the earliest graphical video games.

We've been using markup languages to describe UI layouts declaratively for a long time too.

Adopting similar techniques in browsers was likely as soon as serious front-end coding to build larger client-side web apps became viable, and they have much the same pros and cons now as they did in other UI development before. React and its surrounding ecosystem may have been the first JS libraries to popularise the ideas for a new generation, and IMHO those early versions of React were well done and useful, but let's not pretend the underlying concepts are radical and new in themselves.

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Re:Show HN: Sapper.js – towards a better web app framework by aaron-lebo on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @11:14PM (#16058322)

Yes, but that's never been attached to a frontend that reaches billions of people.

But like you said, those are good ideas, they didn't fail.

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Re:Show HN: Sapper.js – towards a better web app framework by Silhouette on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @11:17PM (#16058338)

Why does the number of people using a UI make any difference to whether the UI does its job well or whether the underlying technologies are appropriate, though? Would any of the arguments for different ways of building UIs change materially if Facebook had a million active users instead of a billion?

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Re:Show HN: Sapper.js – towards a better web app framework by aaron-lebo on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @11:27PM (#16058388)

I'm just saying that even with that model before, we never had tech with the reach or capability as we do now, which makes that interesting.

If it was a good model for building UIs in 1970 and it proved itself then, we should be taking advantage of that on the frontend as well, instead of ignoring it.

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Re:Show HN: Sapper.js – towards a better web app framework by Silhouette on Tuesday January 02, 2018 @11:38PM (#16058449)

In that case, perhaps our views here aren't so different. I'd agree that React was a relatively rare qualitative step forward in the tools available in web development, precisely because it did bring some ideas and programming styles into the front-end JS community for probably the first time. I just disagree with the idea that this was unlike anything that had gone before, because essentially the same fundamental ideas and programming styles have been used elsewhere in the programming community for a very long time.

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