Why is a low learning curve important? Several reasons. If you're a developer, it's not a huge investment to learn (how difficult was it to learn backbone / angular / ember?). If you're a startup / company, you don't need to look for X developers, where X is a difficult-to-pick-up JavaScript framework. You also save money by having a shorter on-boarding period for those non-X developers.

I've worked in a hackathon group that picked Mithril up and created amazing results with it right away. I teach at a coding school, and by far Mithril has been the easiest JS framework for my students to learn and work with. For being so powerful, Mithril is quite easy to get started with – and that means a lot.

Mithril didn't quite have everything we needed, though, so we made a small wrapper that provides nicer templating, event delegation, etc.: https://github.com/dailymuse/mithril-coat

You can use the same approach for other libraries:

Add a function as `config` attribute to your virtual DOM element. That function gets the real DOM element as a parameter, and you can act on it with third party libraries.

I was wondering if anyone had tried both Mithril as well as Deku(https://github.com/segmentio/deku) who would like to share their experience?

All I really want is an easy way to get performant DOM manipulations. With React I have to build the whole view around the component system, which isn't so flexible. Am I right in thinking that Mithril allows you to put the view together any way you want, as long as the end result is an object it can diff into the DOM?

It's not ideal for all use cases. But for updating the DOM based on changes to the data, I find it to be a useful option.

Square built and fast library on top of D3 called Crossfilter. Speed is pretty amazing when you see the data source. http://square.github.io/crossfilter/

That's correct. Virtual DOM nodes are plain JS objects with `tag`, `attr` and `children` attributes (the last two being optional).

The `m()` helper gives you some sugar on top of that.

Idiomatic Mithril view code, however, is more about declaratively generating vDOM nodes based on a model and/or a view model than, say, jQuery-style DOM manipulations...