smussell's comments

There’s a ton of great suggestions here. Here are a couple I haven’t seen mentioned.

Documentaries:

- Silicon Cowboys - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4938484/ It covers the creation of Compaq

- American Experience: Silicon Velley - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/ About how Silicon Valley came to be.

- Naughty Dog 30th Anniversary - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cdr7THH0zo8 Kind of a PR video, but interesting and free. Covers the history of Naughty Dog games.

Books:

- Cukoo’s Egg - https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espiona... Has some interesting technical detail, and gives perspective on a very different time on the internet.

- Revolution in the Valley - https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Valley-Insanely-Great-Stor... You can read these stories on folklore.org, but I enjoyed the collected book. Covers the creation of the Macintosh.

I don't have any issue with the hypersrcipt library presented here. In fact I find it interesting that, this is more or less how React used to work many versions ago. All JSX tags mapped directly to functions and there was no such thing as React.createElement. In fact I was always a little sad that React made that change, it was such a natural mapping. I understand there are under the hood implementation advantages to the move, but having the option to do React.dom.ul(...) was kinda cool.

That said I really don't find any of the authors arguments particularly persuasive. I work with many inexperienced JS devs and haven't seen them struggle with these issues in JSX. Not to discount the authors experiences, it just seems this article could have been more about highlighting the library, rather than creating highly contrived seeming examples of why JSX is bad. I also agree with some of the others, that the advantage of JSX mostly comes in working with designers and people more familiar with HTML than JS.

I don't really agree with this. There are certainly some really bad ways to give live code demos, but I find that when its done well it can be very effective. I feel like the small delays and the slower buildup of code can give me in the audience time to understand and follow along.

It makes me think of my college math classes, I always preferred the professors who would work through the problems by hand on the board during lecture because you could easily follow along through the whole process. I had some professors who used examples prepared ahead of time either on powerpoint or overhead projection, even though the same steps were there, it was harder to follow. I found it more difficult to learn from the prepared demos because it was easier to get overwhelmed, you went from 0 to a lot of content instead of slowly building over time, additionally the professor tended to move a little more quickly than they would have otherwise.

I also think live-demos can be potentially more interactive. Obviously it depends on the situation, but I've seen demos where the audience starts asking questions and its very effective when the presenter can respond with, "let's try that".