Cheng Lou - On the Spectrum of Abstraction at react-europe 2016
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as thought-provoking material on the tradeoffs and costs of abstraction, especially in frontend tooling debates.
What it is
Cheng Lou's react-europe 2016 talk lays out a mental framework for thinking about abstraction levels in JavaScript tooling, from Angular and Grunt to Webpack and React. It uses that framework to reason about the cost of abstractions and how to choose between competing solutions.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2016 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec K0SM0S · 2017-03 · on “Next.js 2.0”
This talk is incredible food for thought: On the spectrum of abstraction by Cheng Lou (react-europe 2016) [1] If you've read some of the classics, such as Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1979, Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson) [2], this talk is a really interesting look at the state of affairs on abstraction circa 2016. [1]: [this video] [2]: [LINK]
Recommends Rygu · 2016-09 · on “On DRY and the cost of wrongful abstractions”
For a more visual explanation of the "cost of abstractions" watch this presentation by Cheng Lou (Facebook). [this video]
Recommends rk06 · 2018-04 · on “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?”
The spectrum of abstraction: [this video] This is an high level talk. it guides on how to choose between competing solutions to a problem when the commonly accepted answer is "it depends"
Recommends namelosw · 2019-05 · on “Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018)”
React is more like 'Lambda the Ultimate Web Component'. A component is almost a function returns element. Expanding a component is like calling a function and give it the property. So you can have some abstract common behavior in HOC f and g, then you can have HOC `h = compose(f(g))`. A quick comparison with Angular: @Component({template, style}) seems composable if we stretch a lot. But why make template and style in the decorator... They are not something we consider most abstract at all. The function is the simplest yet composable abstraction over the template, Cheng Lou also has a really excellent talk on the topic: [this video]
Recommends hnbad · 2022-10 · on “Moving from React to htmx”
I know, this isn't a novel concept. There was a good talk about the spectrum of abstractions and the tradeoffs of template languages vs React's approach at React Europe a couple of years ago (in fact, he goes into that this means there are some optimizations that are simply unavailable to React): [this video] The question isn't whether DSLs or "just JS" are more powerful, the question is which tradeoffs they represent and which tradeoffs you prefer. It seems that HTMX is primarily based in the Python ecosystem and as a former Pythonista I see the advantage of having a DSL over having to write JS, especially that the former is much narrower, which is what you want in this situation.
Cites YuukiRey · 2018-07 · on “Webpack 4 course: What is Webpack?”
Interesting that you should mention it. This talk [this video] mentions some arguments why a DSL would not be a good approach for frontend/JS build tools. Namely that a DSL isn't adequate if the underlying best practices or requirements change a lot. That's why operating at a higher level of abstraction (function chaining/piping/composition) would make more sense. Now... that doesn't really favor Webpack. And I still don't quite understand why that tool is so popular.