My only point in mentioning apollo-tools is that DSLs are very powerful, and have the potential to make complex problems much simpler. SDL is a great example of is, as are vue templates. You may not appreciate the DSL, but, believe me, there are a lot of people who much prefer it. I'm specifically calling out designer type folks here.
> I love how you could find exactly one thing out of a whole list of things that may be just ever so slightly better than JSX.
It's not a question of "better" or "worse". It's a question of tradeoffs on spectrum of abstraction.
I'm not here to bash JSX or react. But you apparently are, and I'm just trying to open your eyes a bit.
When vue came out with JSX, I tried to force it on my team, and there are a serious backlash, to the point where I came to realization that the vue's major strength is actually the templates, and the magic.
You may not like the magic, but a lot of folks do.
As for your specific questions
@ and : are just short hands. That's like saying: what's the difference between `map` vs `reduce` in my component to iterate over an array. They _can_ do the same thing, but map is shorter. In plain JS I can do `i = i + i` `i += i` or `i++` to increment an variable.
@ just means "event handler". @click = "onClick"
: just means "use a dynamic value for this prop
{ } you can put any JS expression, with the plus that you don't have to litter your code with `this`.
Have you ever made a graphql server with apollo-tools? Do you complain that SDL is a "new syntax" that you have to learn when you can just use regular javascript?
> <label @click="edit(todo)">
> This is not Javascript. If it was, it would assign the result of the function call to @click. It doesn't. It's a Javascript-like scripting language that has magical binding into regular Javascript.
Great, so it's not javascript.
To a lot of folks it looks a lot nicer than
<label => this.edit(this.state.todo)}>
There's a lot less noise, and it's _much_ friendlier for (most) designers.
I have never felt that I had to keep hundreds of gotchas in my mind while using vue. The syntax is extremely intuitive (unlike angular). Takes maybe one hour to read through the docs, and you have it.
To me this underscores the most unspoken point. Redux is meant for when you specifically want to build your app around redux. It's not meant to tack on some global store to an existing UI. It is UI agnostic way of separating your business logic and side effects from the UI iself (which could be react, vue, angular, whatever)