Sebastian Markbage: Minimal API Surface Area | JSConf EU 2014 

Well, three years later, here's the answer: Allen Alien - Sehnsucht

@@filmfritzcth And I couldn't be more grateful! Thank you. PS: This one reminded me of Âme - Rej, which I have heard on another conference, where I asked the sound team personally, haha.

+Daniel Bernardes That's why it is purely optional

+Divjot Singh My point was that those rules are not set on stone and should be thought of more as guidelines. Unless you have a very good motive you should follow them. In the case of JSX, writting plain JS react as opposed to JSX would be very unwielding.

Im not sure it even breaks the rules, add sugar when it reduces bugs. I have never tried to write react code without jsx, but creating those strings of markup without errors must surely be nearly impossible

I'd honestly prefer a hyperscript API over JSX any day of the week.

I like to think of JSX as a macro. It just transpiles the code into a different code after all.

It is a library

+schlogen he's basically making a hyperbolic example to stress the point that we are getting ourselves in trouble through overly using abstractions and don't even realize it. Of course it's up to your discretion, but he's prediction/guess/assumption is that as a whole the community needs to dial down our usage of abstractions and implicit behavior in place for explicit, sometimes, repetitive coding practices.

He is steelmanning his argument. The strongest objection to what he is saying would be the reductio that it would lead us to write repetitive code. He is pre-emptively biting that bullet.

Alex Quirk Yes! I basically wrote a similar argument some time ago: stijndewitt.com/2014/05/10/i-like-my-code-wet/

Agree, ive been doing it myself for months now, ever since i ran into a few nasty bugs at work that were the result of contrived abstractions. It was really nice to see this talk and realize i wasn't alone and/or doing something profoundly stupid.

pretty much... and now with es6 modules, this whole pattern being repetitive argument is null and void. write your own functions, put them in a module, call them as needed. game over.

+Ivan Malison I don't agree it is "utterly idiotic". He could have been clearer by using the word "abstraction" less, and selected more carefully the words "library", "standard" and "pattern", all of which are abstractions of a sort. His intended message, as I understood it, was that available standards should be preferred to patterns, which should be preferred to libraries. The use of ES6 classes within React described in the talk was a good example. This approach introduces a shallower learning curve, but at a risk of repetition and verbose code. His argument as I took it was that the verbosity and repetition should be eliminated only when they become an actual maintenance burden, rather than a perceived future one. In a large organisation where anyone could be working on your code at any time (which is how I imagine Facebook to be), this makes perfect sense. If it's one person on a personal project, I agree it seems a bit of an extreme approach.