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Discussion on: Of Chickens and Pigs - The Dilemma of Creator Self Promotion

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Ryan Carniato • Edited

Thinking about this more. Have you ever read: How it Feels to Learn JavaScript in 2016.

The thing is no one wants to be the newcomer asking the questions in that article. But even more no one wants to be the person answering those questions. I suspect Solid will always have trouble with the influencer types, until it reaches a critical mass by its own accord. On one side as a backlash people are much more careful pedalling newer technologies, but there is more to it than that (I've been at with Solid for 3 years in public). That faux conversation covers it well.

There is so much nuance here when trying to describe the benefits of certain projects. You can't afford to muddy the water. If you can say Vue is here and does this well, and React is here does this well. How do you explain Solid is here and sort of does both well without pointing out that the differences are more aesthetic and the justifications are subjective? Absolutes are easy.

I recognized it the first time I engaged on Twitter when people were bashing JSX in the Svelte community. And I was like JSX could easily be used with Svelte. And people were like no. Rich Harris said it couldn't. Well who am I to argue with the creator of Svelte?

In this case it was because I took JSX to be what is as documented, and he took JSX to be what influencers from the React community described it as. I had one such influencer try to tell me that JSX wasn't precompiled.

There is so much confusion of how these libraries work even at the basic level. Like people think that Svelte doesn't have a runtime and doesn't do diffing. How do you have real conversations without correcting that?

And I've had similar exchanges with Evan You about reactivity and the VDOM. This is just something that I will need to adjust to and deal with. And try my best not to come off as a jerk. I know I am not the smartest guy in the room, and most of what I've done is reconcile a system around borrowed concepts. But it is hard not to come off as contrarian.