React: Mixins Considered Harmful
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React: Mixins Considered Harmful
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Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful
#2I believe as time passes, we are moving away from the simplicity that made React win. Flux, Redux, higher order components generate too much complexity most of the time. React used to be simple, it still is, but the ecosystem and the mentality has gotten needlessly complex.
Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful
#3I believe as time passes, we are moving away from the simplicity that made React win. Flux, Redux, higher order components generate too much complexity most of the time. React used to be simple, it still is, but the ecosystem and the mentality has gotten needlessly complex.
You can use React without Flux/Redux if that works well for you. The “mentality” is just people solving their own problems in a way that makes sense to them, and sharing those solutions.
As noted in the blog post, higher order components are not a React feature. And it is not related to Flux or Redux. It is just a thing you can do with components, like you can do it with functions.
We think HOCs are a useful pattern so we explain it, but you don’t need to use it if you don’t get value from it. (We got a lot of value from using it.)
That said if you have different solutions to the same problems that don’t suffer from the drawbacks of mixins, we’d love to hear them. This post is not there to force you to use HOCs. It’s for the people who had the same problems we experienced, tried to use mixins to fix them, and couldn‘t scale those solutions.
Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful
#4I believe as time passes, we are moving away from the simplicity that made React win. Flux, Redux, higher order components generate too much complexity most of the time. React used to be simple, it still is, but the ecosystem and the mentality has gotten needlessly complex.
I feel like React is shifting in the same direction as the JavaScript ecosystem at large, which is unnecessarily complex, disorganized, and fast-moving.
Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful
#5I believe as time passes, we are moving away from the simplicity that made React win. Flux, Redux, higher order components generate too much complexity most of the time. React used to be simple, it still is, but the ecosystem and the mentality has gotten needlessly complex.
That's because people are using it for real things now, not just as a jquery plugin replacement, and it turns out that ignoring hard things doesn't make them go away.
Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful
#6I believe as time passes, we are moving away from the simplicity that made React win. Flux, Redux, higher order components generate too much complexity most of the time. React used to be simple, it still is, but the ecosystem and the mentality has gotten needlessly complex.
If simple things were possible before with React, then they still are, and that's not changing. You don't need Flux and Redux a lot of the time; in my experience they're overused and React component state is underused.
I agree the community mentality of adding lots of complexity on top is a problem. We're working on improving this, but if you have ideas I'd be interested to hear them too.
Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful
#7I believe as time passes, we are moving away from the simplicity that made React win. Flux, Redux, higher order components generate too much complexity most of the time. React used to be simple, it still is, but the ecosystem and the mentality has gotten needlessly complex.
Check out cycle.js. I haven't learned it quite yet but the promises seem really interesting. It's a fully reactive framework unlike react which is reactive only in view.
Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful
#8I personally moved all my projects away from mixins a while ago when I first heard they were deprecated. At first I was frustrated because of JS churn but this certainly was the right move.
For anyone who is apprehensive, the shift in thinking from using mixins to HOCs was not so difficult even if it's initially puzzling.
Quick edit: forgot to mention that this shift made my code way easier to understand in some places and thus the initial investment saves dev time in the long run.
Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful
#9It doesn't fare well that a framework that is only 3 years old already has an extensive list of anti-patterns and tons of statements on what not to do. Also having to do manual performance optimizations using the framework is a hassle to application developers and can be a major pitfall (ex. PureRenderMixin, shouldComponentUpdate).
Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful
#10It doesn't fare well that a framework that is only 3 years old already has an extensive list of anti-patterns and tons of statements on what not to do. Also having to do manual performance optimizations using the framework is a hassle to application developers and can be a major pitfall (ex. PureRenderMixin, shouldComponentUpdate).
No, no, no. This is exactly what makes React so great compared to Angular (to pick one). There's One Way™ to do things correctly. Using anti-pattern "hacks" will work for a little bit, but in the long run come back to bite you as your software grows and scales.
I've been using React for over 2 years now, and still refer back to that list when I feel like something isn't right.