React is mostly hype • Hacker News Board

Re: React is mostly hype

#31

Post by chatmasta » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 11:50 AM UTC

cageface wrote: post #18

methyl wrote: post #8

The arguments are pretty vague, for example > React becomes counterproductive when developing apps that aren't mere demos. I have developed big apps in Backbone, moving very the same apps to React and the productivity went up madly. Facebook does develop apps which certainly cannot be considered "mere demos" and you can see them in action, for example Ad Manager for Facebook on iOS (written in React Native). Facebook…

React itself is pretty simple and very nice to work with. The whole react/redux/react-redux/react-router/react-router-redux/webpack/babel/flow agglomeration on the other hand is a lot more complex and subject to a lot of api churn. But you can actually get pretty far just using React by itself. Don't adopt other parts of this stack until you actually really need them and you can go pretty far with just a few concepts…

Why not take your comment a step further? That is, you can get pretty far using plain js `createElement` and similar functions. In fact I've created a fairly complex SPA without using any external libraries. Don't use react until you absolutely need it!

Back in the day, jQuery was amazing because it made selecting and manipulating DOM elements easy. But now, plain JS has mostly caught up to that functionality, to the point that it rarely makes sense to use jQuery over plain JS. I wonder if in a few years the same will be true of much of the functionality in react.

Re: React is mostly hype

#32

Post by chatmasta » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 11:52 AM UTC

izelnakri wrote: post #9

I want to downvote you as I dont agree with you, but unfortunately I can't.

Generally downvotes are best used not to indicate disagreement, but to punish comments that detract from or add little to the discussion. If we downvoted everyone who disagrees with us, discussion wouldn't be very meaningful. But if we downvote those who do not add to the discussion, we can maintain high signal to noise ratio.

Let's not turn HN into Reddit.

Re: React is mostly hype

#33

Post by hoodoof » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 11:53 AM UTC

I really don't give a shit what anyone says, for me personally ReactJS makes front end great fun to program and an absolute blast and empowers me like never before to build powerful, interactive front end apps with a code base that is well structured, understandable and makes sense.

Until React I dreaded front end development, painful, weird, quirky, hard to organise and generally problemtic. With React I feel like a front end guru.

AngularJS felt like some sort of weird computer science project developed by Phd's who had spent their university days studying Java - it hurt to learn it.

Call me a hipster fanboy if you want but I choose technology to work with because it is easy and make sense. I don't have much time so I have to commit my limited resource to the optimum set of technologies. At the front end that is React.

Re: React is mostly hype

#34

Post by chatmasta » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 11:56 AM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #23

Ignore the react bit, the site is interesting in itself. http://en.arguman.org/ The post is bait-and-switch, react is a bite, time for a switch. :-)

Yeah, really cool website! I'd like to see more arguments laid out this way. Of course that doesn't necessarily mean the points are substantive. :) But it would be nice to collaboratively edit all the common arguments (vim vs emacs for example, which is on this site) so that we have one canonical place to link to when the same argument inevitably arises time and time again.

Re: React is mostly hype

#35

Post by davelnewton » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 11:57 AM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #31

cageface wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React itself is pretty simple and very nice to work with. The whole react/redux/react-redux/react-router/react-router-redux/webpack/babel/flow agglomeration on the other hand is a lot more complex and subject to a lot of api churn. But you can actually get pretty far just using React by itself. Don't adopt other parts of this stack until you actually really need them and you can go pretty far with just a few concepts…

Why not take your comment a step further? That is, you can get pretty far using plain js `createElement` and similar functions. In fact I've created a fairly complex SPA without using any external libraries. Don't use react until you absolutely need it! Back in the day, jQuery was amazing because it made selecting and manipulating DOM elements easy. But now, plain JS has mostly caught up to that functionality, to the…

No, because "plain JS" isn't a UI framework.

We're moving closer to having real GUIs in the browser (e.g., Java Swing) but that's not a function of the language, but the plumbing around the language. Swing isn't Java, Swing is written in Java.

Re: React is mostly hype

#36

Post by zzzaim » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 12:00 PM UTC

If the point of this post is the site arguman.org, not react, then one small issue (I'm on chrome mobile):

- No quick submit + signup/in button

Which is why I guess people rather argue here than on the site (says something if the whole point of the site is to make arguing easier)

Re: React is mostly hype

#37

Post by unsignedqword » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 12:01 PM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #23

Ignore the react bit, the site is interesting in itself. http://en.arguman.org/ The post is bait-and-switch, react is a bite, time for a switch. :-)

Agreed, cool concept. Although I clicked on the random button a few times and found some...odd pages

http://en.arguman.org/fusion-is-just-a-cheap-tactic-to-make-...

http://en.arguman.org/indian-food-is-the-best

http://en.arguman.org/balh

http://en.arguman.org/a-refrigerator-is-a-refrigerator

Re: React is mostly hype

#38

Post by nness » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 12:04 PM UTC

zzzaim wrote: post #36

If the point of this post is the site arguman.org, not react, then one small issue (I'm on chrome mobile): - No quick submit + signup/in button Which is why I guess people rather argue here than on the site (says something if the whole point of the site is to make arguing easier)

I think this submission is more to promote the Arguman service than anything else. Because most of the submissions come from just two people, who both joined the service less than 24 hours ago.

Re: React is mostly hype

#39

Post by zaidf » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 12:04 PM UTC

If true, then what is a competing JS DOM renderer with same or nearly same DOM rendering speed?

Closest I've found is Vue but it was still 20-30% slower than React, according to the DOM speed test on a benchmarking site.

Re: React is mostly hype

#40

Post by chatmasta » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 12:06 PM UTC

davelnewton wrote: post #35

chatmasta wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not take your comment a step further? That is, you can get pretty far using plain js `createElement` and similar functions. In fact I've created a fairly complex SPA without using any external libraries. Don't use react until you absolutely need it! Back in the day, jQuery was amazing because it made selecting and manipulating DOM elements easy. But now, plain JS has mostly caught up to that functionality, to the…

No, because "plain JS" isn't a UI framework. We're moving closer to having real GUIs in the browser (e.g., Java Swing) but that's not a function of the language, but the plumbing around the language. Swing isn't Java, Swing is written in Java.

If you use createElement, appendChild, and innerHTML, you can replicate a lot of the functionality of react. In fact react probably uses a lot of that under the hood. Of course for more complex applications, react is cleaner. But for relatively simple components, manually manipulating the DOM like this might be worth skipping the overhead of react.