React: Mixins Considered Harmful • Hacker News Board

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#61

Post by zuck9 » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 7:23 PM UTC

danabramov wrote: post #3

ludwigvan wrote: post #2

I 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…

What I think OP refers to, is how there are so many different choices to do anything in the React ecosystem. It's cool that people share their work. But so many choices just cause decision fatigue.

It's hard to have any kind of real-world usage from just React. You have to learn and use some kind of Flux, routing library, AJAX patterns for that Flux library, another library for and , etc. If you want server-side rendering, server-side data persistence or user auth, which you will in real-world cases, you have even more things to connect.

Also there aren't any free resources on the internet (that I could find) that teaches me how to put together a basic Twitter or Instagram clone using React + React ecosystem libs. No full-stack tutorials. Compared to Rails, React{ecosystem} is pretty hard to learn.

Unless you're an experienced senior dev and understand all the different technologies deeply, you can't make any informed choice about what libraries to use. You just go and pick the most popular ones and later doubt your decision and think that you could be having an easier time if you had picked some other popular library more suited to your project.

I guess most beginners just give up on React after trying a bunch of tutorials. I'm no Rails developer, but I guess even if you are a Rails developer with years of experience, you will find it frustrating to get started on React + ecosystem.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#62

Post by danabramov » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 7:26 PM UTC

zuck9 wrote: post #61

danabramov wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What I think OP refers to, is how there are so many different choices to do anything in the React ecosystem. It's cool that people share their work. But so many choices just cause decision fatigue. It's hard to have any kind of real-world usage from just React. You have to learn and use some kind of Flux, routing library, AJAX patterns for that Flux library, another library for and , etc. If you want server-side rend…

I agree that “getting started” experience is far from optimal. We take this feedback to the heart and want to improve this in the future. But how is this relevant to the post about mixins?

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#63

Post by tlrobinson » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 7:27 PM UTC

nathancahill wrote: post #10

daliwali wrote: post #9

It 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.

I love React, but once you move beyond toy applications it's definitely not always clear what the "one way to do things correctly" is. This is even more true when you start talking about the rest of the ecosystem (testing? build tools? style? Redux?).

I sometimes wish for an opinionated framework that's built around React and possibly Redux (that said, I have pretty strong opinions so there would have to be significant overlap)

That said, I never got deep enough into Angular to know whether React is better or worse in that respect.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#64

Post by danabramov » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 7:28 PM UTC

gedy wrote: post #54

danabramov wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you help me understand where React is shifting into a complex direction? To me, it looks like we are no longer recommending a complex pattern that we specifically supported in code (mixins), and instead recommend a simpler pattern that “just works” in JavaScript (higher order functions/components). If anything, we are shifting to a simpler direction, and it worked better for us. We are sharing the lessons we lear…

I think part of it is that not everyone is expert or familiar with functional programming (trained on OOP, etc) and it can feel overwhelming to many. "This is simpler - just another function" is somewhat subjective.

I believe this is exactly why we explain this pattern in the blog post in detail instead of just saying “this is simpler—just another function!”

We are trying to both deliver a library that helps people ship quality apps, share our learnings about what worked, and what didn’t, and educate the community about the patterns that we found useful in our experience.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#65

Post by tlrobinson » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 7:30 PM UTC

I thought this was pretty well known by now, given the lack of mixin support in ES6 React components (and functional stateless components), but this is a nice summary of the problems and solutions.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#66

Post by zuck9 » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 7:30 PM UTC

danabramov wrote: post #62

zuck9 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I think OP refers to, is how there are so many different choices to do anything in the React ecosystem. It's cool that people share their work. But so many choices just cause decision fatigue. It's hard to have any kind of real-world usage from just React. You have to learn and use some kind of Flux, routing library, AJAX patterns for that Flux library, another library for and , etc. If you want server-side rend…

I agree that “getting started” experience is far from optimal. We take this feedback to the heart and want to improve this in the future. But how is this relevant to the post about mixins?

I see it went OT, sorry about that.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#67

Post by adamnemecek » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 7:31 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #45

danabramov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cycle is indeed interesting! React is not “fully reactive” by design, and does not plan to move further into the reactive direction. We think that React is well-positioned in the app to understand how to efficiently schedule work instead, which is something that would be harder for us to do with a reactive “push” approach. I think as time goes, it will be interesting to see how both Cycle and React evolve into differ…

If you haven't looked at it in some time, Cycle.js has just really improved in the last month, an effort the devs are calling "diversity". Under the hood, that means RxJS is no longer a hard dependency, as a bunch of different reactive modules are now usable, including Staltz's new "xstream". Not having looked at Cycle in a few months, I'm not certain what all the particular changes have been, but I'm finding everyth…

There has also been some perf work done recently it seems http://www.stefankrause.net/wp/?p=301

I have to look a little closer at the tests to be able to interpret the data but taking it on face value it seems like they are doing good work.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#68

Post by brlewis » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 7:32 PM UTC

spicyj wrote: post #6

ludwigvan wrote: post #2

I 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.

I bet React programmers who write a Mithril component or two would come back to React with more readiness to use component state. I don't have a plan for how you could use this idea to improve the community, though.

As for the mentality of adding complexity -- are you sure that's a community problem? It seems a problem with programming in general. Advocates of adding complexity tend to be louder than advocates of using what's already there.

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#69

Post by wmccullough » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 7:32 PM UTC

I'll likely catch some hell, but there's a reason mixins are considered an anti-pattern in most languages...

Re: React: Mixins Considered Harmful

#70

Post by shados » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 7:33 PM UTC

Touche wrote: post #5

ludwigvan wrote: post #2

I 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.

Yup. That's the point. The average frontend app really sucks. Error handling is poor, routing is bad, offline support is non-existent, it's buggy as hell, slow, etc.

Now, not all apps need all of those things to be good, but they usually need some combination of those things. When you start making things "good", they're hard. Peanut Gallery Joe who learnt Rail and JavaScript over the summer jumping in this is not equipped to make a good app, and gets overwhelmed.

Compared to writing "robust" applications in other ecosystems, the React world is really not that bad.