I'd point out Steven Wittens' Model View Catharsis[1] as some discussion that adopts similar framing to my own, that emphasizes the Immediate vs Retained mode distinction as a core way to analyze different web toolkits.

> Immediate mode has a specific meaning that isn't really what React is doing. There's no concept of avoiding double buffering, immediate mode re-renders everything every frame while vdom avoids as much work as possible and updates are only triggered by actions.

I've shown above others with similar framing to my own. I think you are over-focusing & refusing to see a similarity that is quite present. From a programmer perspective, react is about calling React.render(myJsx, domElement), again and again and again. How much more immediate mode does it get? "Redraw the world" is the premise.

As for double buffering, that's pretty much what the vdom is doing! There's the current buffer, there's the new world, and the vdom machinery is pushing the new buffer onto the old buffer once the render completes.

> But there's more interesting to them than just being declarative. A pure render function, a standardized prop boundary, top down data flow, and lifecycles (further improved by hooks, which are basically algebraic effects, which make real hot reloading work), are just as important, and all of those fall under "components".

These are all good characteristics of React, and part of it's total package that defines it. Interesting, yes! I think I am under-attributing the different feel of components versus where the web was before. A lof of this, feels, to me, like an incident discovery to a bigger phase change, from retained to immediate. I see a lot of those finger prints in other immediate mode rendering places. But it's very new to the web, best I can tell. I need to go back & re-review Enyo. Been a while. Ahh the heady days of two way data-binding!!

To hash up some specific points? Declarative is only part of it. The DOM is declarative. But the DOM is not immediate mode rendering, it's a retained system. The declarativeness feels normal?

Pure render functions are neat to see on the web, yeah. A lot of other immediate mode systems have this, geometry shaders being a large class of systems that often are pure functions.

The prop boundary seems like something the DOM already has & used a lot, if not quite so heavily bounded. This is just properties on elements, only expressed in a slightly different way: that distinction doesn't draw any major note for me, is an interesting twist, but just a re-embodiment of what was. That it's a harder boundary now doesn't do a ton for me- elements have been powered by their properties since DOM1 & it's very normal on Custom Elements.

Top down data-flow again feels like something relatively naturally emergent most scene-graph rendering systems, not unique to React. The web itself is a big top down renderer, always has been. It's weird because I both see tons of parallels between templates (which often nest or accept children or slots) and React components, but also I see that the feel is quite different, that components somehow are different, although I struggle to characterize how they really are and how this has changed webdev.

Not sure how I feel about lifecycle either. Willing to give this one to componenents. Definitely not a very immediate-mode idea, more like something we'd see in a scene-graph though.

[1] https://acko.net/blog/model-view-catharsis/