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> React is not a templater, it's a differ.

It's a templater, read my message above - an advanced tempalter, which means it has some DOM rendering optimizations.

> The only similarity between PHP and React is that you can have tags in ("around" in PHP's case) your code.

Not just tags, but an entire "view" thing, a representation, so old fashion messy/sloppy/spaghetti-like PHP like code style.

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You give React a state, it diffs that and passes the outcome to the ReactDOM, which can render it on the DOM. At its core React doesn't know what a <div/> is. It just diffs objects and generates instructions to reach the next state (very generally speaking here). The stuff you pass to it is an object and can't be malformed like a string can. Main function of React is maybe loosely related with templating.

For PHP (in its traditional form), everything around the code is just strings, which is also the case for most of the templating engines.

You can't shout "spaghetti code" every time you see XML tags in code. Think Scala or VB.

nothing about React is messy or sloppy. it is the exact opposite.

the notion that your view logic and it's template must be completely decoupled is an antiquated and misguided best practice.

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