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Comment by BigJono | Hacker News Reader

It seems quite intuitive that the complexity of code scales with the amount of build time logic it contains, whether that be C macros, JS transpilation, or whatever else.

I think if a lot of developers programmed with this mindset we'd be in a much better place. The best example I can think of off the top of my head is people choosing Vue over React "for it's simplicity". You're really just taking the little bits of ritual and reliance on JS fundamentals that React contains (which isn't that much in the first place) and moving that complexity into a DSL with a big transpilation footprint.

It makes sense from a "I want to play around and build features quick" perspective, but it's a horrid decision in terms of the complexity of the software and the number of moving parts it contains. Unless like many you (foolishly) believe the law of leaky abstractions doesn't apply in JS land for whatever reason.

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I couldn’t agree more. I almost want to call it the iceberg metric. If 90% of your complexity is hidden underwater it’s still there, you just don’t notice it until your boat crashes into it.

But this is also how civilization is built. We need that 90% to be underwater just to build the remaining 10%.

Proper macros make that complexity much more accessible. That is, if things work correctly, you still don't notice, but if they don't, you get to easily fix them (though you still have to pay the cost of understanding it first).

Macros can be seen as incidental tooling reduced to only essential complexity. For comparison, a typical JS transpilation toolchain seems more like 80% of incidental complexity.

I definitely agree with this. I think there's obviously a point where the complexity savings from using a macro outweigh the inherent disadvantages. But I'd also guess that a large percentage of the programmers using them wouldn't know where to draw that line, and probably don't spare a single thought on it.

My point was more around instances where the supposed benefits of moving that logic to build time are superficial, which as you alluded to, is rife within the JS ecosystem.

I hate to pick on Vue too much, because for the most part it's a pretty good tool, but in their docs they claim one of the motivations for building Vue and using it over React was that it's more familiar to people who have built traditional web apps, because it leverages more html/css knowledge rather than JS knowledge (it doesn't, other than in superficial ways, by the way. But that's a discussion for another day). This seems insane to me. Just as insane as if you used a ton of C or Lisp macros to make the language look like Python, just because your devs were used to Python. I feel like in those communities you'd get called out for adding a bunch of accidental complexity and told to suck it up and just learn C. But in JS land it's just par for the course.

You also have hdom & co. coming from the i-am-not-a-framework side - https://github.com/thi-ng/umbrella/

Production size and evaluation times are a thing with react apps.

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