[Phanx]

My current project at work is all in React, and I agree that JSX is great ... for generating JavaScript applications.

I also agree with SDPhantom that that generated Lua code is massively cringe-worthy. It's bloated, convoluted, overly verbose, visually unappealing (those underscores everywhere!) and just generally hard to read and follow.

Compare:

local window = New("WindowWithTitle")
-- ^ Let's pretend here that "New" is your constructor function,
-- and returns a valid frame with all the appropriate parts.
window:SetMovable(true)
window:SetWidth(512)
window:SetHeight(512)
window:SetPoint("CENTER")
 
window.title:SetText("Broxxigar the red")
 
local text = window:CreateFontString()
text:SetPoint("TOPLEFT")
text:SetPoint("BOTTOMRIGHT", window, "RIGHT")
text:SetJustifyH("LEFT")
text:SetJustifyV("TOP")
 
text:SetText("Even for an orc, Broxigar the Red was obsessed with honor ...")
-- ^ Truncated for the sake of brevity in this example.
 
local button1 = New("SmallButton")
button1:SetParent(window)
button1:SetPoint("BOTTOMLEFT")
button1:SetText("OK")
button1:SetScript("OnClick", function(self, mouseButton)
    print("You pressed ok")
end)
 
local button2 = New("SmallButton")
button2:SetParent(window)
button2:SetPoint("BOTTOMRIGHT")
button2:SetText("Cancel")
button2:SetScript("OnClick", function(self, mouseButton)
    print("You pressed cancel")
end)
 
window:RegisterEvent("UNIT_AURA")
window:SetScript("OnEvent", function(self, event, ...)
    if event == "UNIT_AURA" then
        print("Someone gained aura!", ...)
    end
end)

Now there's no mystery variables, you're not creating a billion unnecessary tables and functions, and it's very clear to anyone who looks at it what's going on at any place in the code.