While reflecting on this topic one day, a question arose: Can I write React code that is aesthetically delightful while

A lot has been discussed about JSX since its introduction, but I’ll allow myself a quick consideration of it for the sake of elucidating my point. JSX is messy, but it is also a reality. It comes from a natural evolution of front-end technologies, which have since their beginning some form of XML language to define markup. What makes it different is that JSX usually lives inside your JavaScript code.

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r 8,000 users, it found that over 80 percent of users said they monitored their partner’s social interactions (both in-person and through social media) and over 60 percent of them said that if they discovered their spouses were cheating they would end up leaving them.

You’re afraid you’ll have to become someone you don’t want to be to succeed. Maybe you think you’ll have to compromise your character. Often, you’re worried about the blow to your ego and no longer being able to use ‘potential you’ as a crutch.

I find semicolons in JS code an unnecessary noise, and I’m happy taking the risks that come from not using them. After I incorporated StandardJS into my reference example, I was left with the following:

When you’re struggling with something in your life, drill down to the root cause. Often, you’ll find a similar answer. Most of your hesitation in life comes from attaching your identity to the outcomes that happen in your life.

My answers to this question are more often than not something else that not React. But every once in a while, you compare every trade-off; you look at your project from different perspectives; you try to rethink the features you envisioned and the requirements you had; and still, at the end of the day, React will be your answer. With those cases in mind, I reframed the original question to: “how far can I go to make my React code more pleasing to view while still keeping it React code?”

JavaScript is an extremely flexible language, a quality well known as its double-edged sword. It is also something that can be explored from an aesthetic perspective. There are many different ways you can write valid code, with significant stylistic differences and a few technical implications. Many tools will help you customize and enforce the stylistic choices you make, and between those, there’s one much of my liking: StandardJS. StandardJS is a tool for automating applying a collection of sensible coding style choices to your code. Of notable aesthetic implication between those choices is the exclusion of semicolons.

To start answering the question, I created a Create React App project with a simple React code as a reference. I wanted it to have at least a bit of real-lifeless but still be simple enough, so it wouldn’t get in the way of testing different things. I chose the official React tutorial code, which you can find here: Tic Tac Toe.

The uniformity and conciseness of the code make for a substantial aesthetic improvement. And we can go further in the no-JSX road. I’m far from being the first person discussing JSX adoption. And hating it is probably as old as JSX itself. I bet the original team behind it had someone saying at least that it was unnecessary. You’ll find plenty of reading on reasons why JSX is terrible and the benefits of not using it. Gladly, you’ll also find technically sound alternatives to it. A prominent one is Hyperscript, which is recommended by the React team in their docs. It is a simple tool that helps you build hypertext using JavaScript. Its React version brings a more attractive API then `createElement` gives us. I decided to try it out together with a tiny library of helpers called `hyperscript-helpers`, and I found that those tools contribute to the code aesthetic quite nicely:

Making a rough comparison with spoken languages, JSX is as if the speakers of a particular language started using a whole set of words and expressions from other languages to express themselves. This frequently happens when a specific subject is innate to a given culture, for example. When people outside that culture, speakers of a different language, face that challenge of expressing ideas about that subject, they’ll often lack the vocabulary to deal with it, recurring to the language spoken by those who “gave birth” to the topic as a way to solve it. Language purists soon get angry and point out how you could say those things without the need for imported words. But people would still use those words, and some of those words will eventually be incorporated into the official language. JSX was born from the need for JavaScript speakers to express UI markup.

Replacing JSX is the Pareto principle applied to the beautification of React code. Little effort, excellent result. A move everyone should definitely make if they want prettier React code.

Now in terms of JavaScript code, this was the best I could get. And looking back to what I had done so far, things were looking ok. The changes implemented were straightforward and could easily be integrated into my default side-project React setup. On the other hand, this was still aesthetically far from what I experienced in different languages. I’ve discussed the case for other languages already, and the point was I wanted to stick with React in a JS world. Unless there would be something that adds some sparkles of elegance to JavaScript while still being just like JavaScript, I’d be too far off the boundary I had set.

Moving on with exploring ways of prettifying your React code in the framework’s realm, I found a dead-end. While there are design patterns and simple conventions I could explore, those require assessing their technical implications on a case-by-case basis, and I was looking for something more general. So the next step would need to be in the JavaScript layer.

Following the language speakers’ analogy, a few souls use the language for aesthetic purposes and a means of self-expression. It is generally the case for poets and literary writers. How do they look at foreign language words? Well, they’ll undoubtedly see them differently. Their perspective is analogous to my view here, as it looks at language from its power to express ideas while also considering it aesthetically. From this perspective, the use of JSX is unnecessary: it adds noise and does not contribute to the expression of the ideas it expresses.

And this is the point where things get subjective: I find this code unpleasant. Again I’m not talking about the technical attributes of this code. When I say it is ugly, I’m trying to express a set of feelings it evokes in me, which are heavily based on my own experience of the world in general and programming specifically. It is from this perspective that I’ll move on to say that the first problem that screams to me is JSX.