I 'invented' the concept for this back in 2011, and it was used (as a proprietary lib) in various startups. Even though many similar open source libs have been released since, and boy have I tried a lot of them, none have been able to capture the elegance and DX of what we had back then. I might be biased though. :-)
So I started creating a cleaned-up, modern, TypeScript, open source implementation for the concept about five years ago. After many iterations, working on the project on and off, I'm finally happy with its API and the developer experience it offers. I'm calling it 1.0!
The concept: It uses many small, anonymous functions for emitting DOM elements, and automatically reruns them when their underlying proxied data changes. This proxied data can be anything from simple values to complex, typed, and deeply nested data structures.
As I'm currently free to spend my time on labors of love like this, I'm planning to expand the ecosystem around this to include synchronizing data with a remote server/database, and to make CRUD apps very rapid and perhaps even pleasurable to implement.
I've celebrated 1.0 by creating a tutorial with editable interactive examples! https://aberdeenjs.org/Tutorial/
I would love to hear your feedback. The first few people to actually give Aberdeen a shot can expect fanatical support from me! :-)
What landed me on $ was that a don't like polluting my namespaces with function named `a`, `b`, `p`, `form`, `input`. And you'll often want to add CSS classes, so you'll have to create a "string" anyway. Also, we'd need a generic $-like function anyway, for less common tags and for attaching properties/behavior/text content to the 'current' element.
Back in the CoffeeScript days, we did at some point expose HTML tags as function though, and it made for awesome looking (though very error-prone) code! :-)
form ->
h2 "Sign up"
input placeholder: "Name", bind: name