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0 pointsyoz-y2mo ago0 comments

I know people love to make UIs stateless and functional. But they just aren’t. IMO UIs are fundamentally a bunch of state, graphically represented. So naturally all of the functional frameworks are full of escape hatches.

I’d rather have a honest framework than a chimera.

I have not followed SwiftUI recently but when it was introduced I quite liked to have the main composition in SwiftUI and then writing more complex components in pure UIKit. Both could be used what they are best suited for. But trying to shoehorn good interactivity into a SwiftUI component always ended in horrible code.

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ikety2mo ago

What about Elm? I think most people could grasp the elm architecture in an afternoon. To me this MVU style is pretty much perfect for UI.

I think a lot of the time React appears complex and hacky is because we tried to solve world hunger with one component. I've worked on plenty of React projects that were very easy to scale, modify and iterate because they focused so heavily on small independent stateless components.

sevenseacat2mo ago

Elm is awesome until you try to use it in an actual app. The amount of pain we went through trying to make a basic web app with a sidebar and a few pages... I don't remember the specifics, it was a few years ago, but I don't think Elm has changed much since then (it was 0.18).

mejutoco2mo ago

> I know people love to make UIs stateless and functional. But they just aren’t. IMO UIs are fundamentally a bunch of state, graphically represented. So naturally all of the functional frameworks are full of escape hatches.

Functional does not mean no state, just constraining state to inputs and outputs. Breaking that is a choice, and not good design.

Elm, for example, provides all of that with one escape hatch: ports. It is really well-defined and that not fall into any of the impossibilities you mention.

niam2mo ago

> UIs are fundamentally a bunch of state

React doesn't really contest that as-worded. It's just that, ideally, a nested component isn't the owner of important state.

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