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React Makes You Sad?

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Re: React Makes You Sad?

#21
post #12
post #10

I've just started playing with React and my general opinion is that it's a very 'Facebook' project. Lots of restrictions on what you can do and when keeping all of the coders in line with what you're supposed to be doing and following the 'Facebook' way of programming. I'm sure it's great for writing traditional crud apps, but anything outside of the box that it wasn't intended is a major pain requiring major hacks j…

This is the weirdest argument I've ever heard against React, and, as someone who does a fair bit of React work, I try to pay attention to all those arguments.

It's certainly a weird phrasing of an argument. However, it seems reasonable that some programmers will not like the specific style of structure that react espouses. Specifically the top-down push of data through parent-child component relationships. Specifically, if you are working with a lot of third party components that are not react based, it can be hard (or a lot of boilerplate) to contain them within react applications.

Re: React Makes You Sad?

#22
post #15
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the weirdest argument I've ever heard against React, and, as someone who does a fair bit of React work, I try to pay attention to all those arguments.

Just my experience. Obviously not one that's common, but I was also doing something quite a bit different than most people that use it, I'm sure.

What were you doing?

Re: React Makes You Sad?

#23

Lol. I found React interesting, too, but I don't like to read Javascript code, so I rolled my own React-like framework in Scala. Life is so much easier if you don't have to depend on other peoples mess.

Life is so much easier if you don't have to depend on other peoples mess.

Future-you is going to look back on this comment and curse loudly.

Re: React Makes You Sad?

#24

React made me sad, so I switched to Mithril[1]. Not only is it significantly smaller in size, but it's way faster and includes a router and AJAX methods out of the box. I wish more people would give it a shot. That said, I do still love React Native, and use React on a daily basis to take advantage of the "write once, run anywhere" paradigm. [1] https://lhorie.github.io/mithril/

I've recently started playing with Mithril as well and I quite like it.

I haven't used React or Mithril enough to speak confidently about the differences, but it seems Mithril offers everything React does and more with better performance and documentation.

Re: React Makes You Sad?

#25

Lol. I found React interesting, too, but I don't like to read Javascript code, so I rolled my own React-like framework in Scala. Life is so much easier if you don't have to depend on other peoples mess.

...where "other peoples mess" is based on battle-hardened production code from Facebook...

Re: React Makes You Sad?

#26
This comment thread feels so barren, without a bunch of seasoned software professionals encountering JS build tools and immediately taking leave of their senses and declaring defeat.

Re: React Makes You Sad?

#27

React made me sad, so I switched to Mithril[1]. Not only is it significantly smaller in size, but it's way faster and includes a router and AJAX methods out of the box. I wish more people would give it a shot. That said, I do still love React Native, and use React on a daily basis to take advantage of the "write once, run anywhere" paradigm. [1] https://lhorie.github.io/mithril/

The React Native approach is actually "learn once, write anywhere."

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1014532261909640/react-nativ...

Re: React Makes You Sad?

#28
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just my experience. Obviously not one that's common, but I was also doing something quite a bit different than most people that use it, I'm sure.

What were you doing?

Writing a 'driver' to integrate my low level UI component library to be usable with React. My major issue was the 'rule' that a parent can't access the 'state' of it's children; this turned a 2 hour job into a 3 day job for me just trying to find a way to get access to this state through all of the lifecycle callbacks while instantiating children at the same time.

When asked in #reactjs, they said that if you need access to a child's state you should put it into the parent, which makes sense but not in my case. There is a natural way of hiding working 'upwards' through the chain, but I can't say I've seen it ever work downwards like in React, and I found that rather frustrating and difficult to work around.

Re: React Makes You Sad?

#29

Lol. I found React interesting, too, but I don't like to read Javascript code, so I rolled my own React-like framework in Scala. Life is so much easier if you don't have to depend on other peoples mess.

Your comment would be helpful if it linked to something people could see, but otherwise, it just comes off as empty bragging, without a coherent critique. To me at least.

I think publishing code would be in conflict with parent's message; by using your own hand-rolled mess, you at least don't have to depend on other people's mess.

I must agree that my own mess is far more comprehensible that someone else's. Until Old Code Syndrome strikes, anyway.

Re: React Makes You Sad?

#30
This reminds me of that Netflix talk on React [1].

In it, the guy first praises React to the heavens, then spends the rest of the session explaining all the ways they had to disable and work around React to get what they wanted with decent performance.

It seemed to me like their use case could have been done with jQuery in a few hundred lines. Maybe I missed something.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g01dGsKbXOk

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