More than React, I'm interested in the question of how to best write UI through code, in general.

Even though I'm a fan of React, and use it for practically every web application I build, my biggest and most obvious issue has been that writing UIs through React doesn't feel as natural as, say, writing command line tools in Go, or live/realtime apps in Elixir.

Some languages just feel incredibly natural and frictionless for certain things, and nobody has really nailed UIs yet. Swift, JSX/HTML, Svelte, or whatever framework of the week: they all feel like they're working around the problem to some extent. Like at some point in the process, the designers of the language/framework had to compromise and implement some hacky/weird/painful syntax to satisfy project requirements.

UI's natural interface is visual, so tools like Figma can serve as an essential part of the solution, but nonetheless, I feel there's something missing. There must be a more intuitive way to represent the visual through code. The current solutions, although I find it hard to describe precisely, are always tantalizingly lacking in one way or another.

As an engineer, it's easy to look at every problem and think to yourself: "There is a perfect solution for this, we just haven't found it yet."

Yet, as the years go by, I find myself accepting a less idealistic answer: Maybe there isn't. Maybe the problem space is just so complex that no one (humanly feasible) general solution exists for all forms of it. If there's one thing that this is true for, UI is probably it.