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How Facebook's Instagram Acquisition Led to the Open Sourcing of React.js

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Re: How Facebook's Instagram Acquisition Led to the Open Sourcing of React.js

#51

Post by awjr »

hamstercat wrote: post #13

In my day work we're using Angular 2 (Angular 4 technically), and while I prefer React it's not necessarily bad, just not as good in my opinion. That being said, backward compatibility is crazy non-existant. I had a library that required me to update to the latest version, would have been a minor bump. It wouldn't work with my current version, but then I upgraded and other libraries started breaking because they woul…

More interestingly that is simply a maturity issue. React told people the official API and people still used hidden features as it was easy and clever. Thankfully Facebook did the right thing, kept the API sacred and refactored all the hidden APIs breaking the world.

People got bloody noses and red faced and the React ecosystem is a better place for it.

Re: How Facebook's Instagram Acquisition Led to the Open Sourcing of React.js

#52

Post by yonasb »

danso wrote: post #41

> The guy that actually originally came up with idea for React, Jordan Walke, came from the ads team. He was like, "making a change on this product is terrifying, like potentially lose a day of revenue because you’ve missed a semicolon or something." He had felt the ads pain and then he convinced them after building this thing on nights and weekends to work on it full time for a little while. As he was working on thi…

I was just reflecting on this. If you agree that React is a net positive for software development (efficiency, creating complicated UIs faster), then you can make the case that Ads on Facebook have indirectly helped a lot of engineers and thus companies.

They had a problem, a piece of technology was created to solve it, and then released to the world, and now many others are able to solve problems using the same technology. Seems like this is exactly how open source should work (license issues aside).

The fact that this all comes back to Ads highlights the importance of Ads in the software development ecosystem IMO.

Worth noting that Google and Facebook have contributed a ton of open source to the world and they’re both built on ads. Amazon and Apple on the other hand do far less open sourcing and their businesses don’t rely on ads. Not saying there’s causation, but does make you wonder why that’s the case.

Re: How Facebook's Instagram Acquisition Led to the Open Sourcing of React.js

#53

Post by rybosome »

hamstercat wrote: post #13

In my day work we're using Angular 2 (Angular 4 technically), and while I prefer React it's not necessarily bad, just not as good in my opinion. That being said, backward compatibility is crazy non-existant. I had a library that required me to update to the latest version, would have been a minor bump. It wouldn't work with my current version, but then I upgraded and other libraries started breaking because they woul…

> The main reason I've heard for using Angular 2 at my work is that it's made by Google, but it's not like they use it themselves.

A lot of Google’s bigger products like gmail and maps predate Angular, though there are some products like the Google Cloud Platform Console that use it (https://console.cloud.google.com).

Re: How Facebook's Instagram Acquisition Led to the Open Sourcing of React.js

#54

Post by collectively »

yonasb wrote: post #52
danso wrote: post #41

> The guy that actually originally came up with idea for React, Jordan Walke, came from the ads team. He was like, "making a change on this product is terrifying, like potentially lose a day of revenue because you’ve missed a semicolon or something." He had felt the ads pain and then he convinced them after building this thing on nights and weekends to work on it full time for a little while. As he was working on thi…

I was just reflecting on this. If you agree that React is a net positive for software development (efficiency, creating complicated UIs faster), then you can make the case that Ads on Facebook have indirectly helped a lot of engineers and thus companies. They had a problem, a piece of technology was created to solve it, and then released to the world, and now many others are able to solve problems using the same tech…

I mean, software companies will spin ads any way they can to get engineers interested. That’s their prerogative. It doesn’t mean any of it is true—the world is 100% worse off due to ads, and no amount of smooth scrolling animations is going to change that.

Re: How Facebook's Instagram Acquisition Led to the Open Sourcing of React.js

#55

Post by collectively »

dsjoerg wrote: post #6

"and that’s why you don’t get an Angular 2 scenario with React because the people paying the price are the people actually making the breaking changes" Amen

That’s actually true of angular 2 as well, so the quote is just false. Angular 2’s dysfunction has little to do with dogfooding.

Re: How Facebook's Instagram Acquisition Led to the Open Sourcing of React.js

#56

Post by rifung »

hamstercat wrote: post #13

In my day work we're using Angular 2 (Angular 4 technically), and while I prefer React it's not necessarily bad, just not as good in my opinion. That being said, backward compatibility is crazy non-existant. I had a library that required me to update to the latest version, would have been a minor bump. It wouldn't work with my current version, but then I upgraded and other libraries started breaking because they woul…

> it's made by Google, but it's not like they use it themselves.

I work at Google (Cloud) but not on front end. All the front end SWEs I've talked to use Angular for their projects so we definitely do use it!

Re: How Facebook's Instagram Acquisition Led to the Open Sourcing of React.js

#57

Post by sanatgersappa »

peterhunt wrote: post #49
mihaela wrote: post #14

React is great but this: "I’m waiting for the day when the only way that you build UI, the only way you can build UI is with the React paradigm." is scary.

To be clear, I didn't mean that I want React-the-library baked into every platform. I do think that React-the-mental-model is superior to, say, Cocoa-the-mental-model, and by baking this model into the underlying layers of the stack we'd stand to see a lot of performance gains. Just my 2 cents though.

True. fwiw, Google's new mobile UI framework Flutter uses the React paradigm.

Re: How Facebook's Instagram Acquisition Led to the Open Sourcing of React.js

#58

Post by golergka »

collectively wrote: post #54
yonasb wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just reflecting on this. If you agree that React is a net positive for software development (efficiency, creating complicated UIs faster), then you can make the case that Ads on Facebook have indirectly helped a lot of engineers and thus companies. They had a problem, a piece of technology was created to solve it, and then released to the world, and now many others are able to solve problems using the same tech…

I mean, software companies will spin ads any way they can to get engineers interested. That’s their prerogative. It doesn’t mean any of it is true—the world is 100% worse off due to ads, and no amount of smooth scrolling animations is going to change that.

> the world is 100% worse off due to ads

Do you have the source for that? Personally, most of the modern targeted ads I notice are a net gain for my life. Do you have a different experience?

Re: How Facebook's Instagram Acquisition Led to the Open Sourcing of React.js

#59

Post by username223 »

yonasb wrote: post #52
danso wrote: post #41

> The guy that actually originally came up with idea for React, Jordan Walke, came from the ads team. He was like, "making a change on this product is terrifying, like potentially lose a day of revenue because you’ve missed a semicolon or something." He had felt the ads pain and then he convinced them after building this thing on nights and weekends to work on it full time for a little while. As he was working on thi…

I was just reflecting on this. If you agree that React is a net positive for software development (efficiency, creating complicated UIs faster), then you can make the case that Ads on Facebook have indirectly helped a lot of engineers and thus companies. They had a problem, a piece of technology was created to solve it, and then released to the world, and now many others are able to solve problems using the same tech…

It's sort of like the Manhattan Project writ small. Back then we roasted a few hundred thousand Japanese people, and we may still extinguish life on our planet, but we ended up with some pretty sweet tech. Now we're cynically monitoring and manipulating billions of people, but we may end up with easier ways to create complicated web pages.

Re: How Facebook's Instagram Acquisition Led to the Open Sourcing of React.js

#60

Post by tomelders »

tashoecraft wrote: post #18
hamstercat wrote: post #13

In my day work we're using Angular 2 (Angular 4 technically), and while I prefer React it's not necessarily bad, just not as good in my opinion. That being said, backward compatibility is crazy non-existant. I had a library that required me to update to the latest version, would have been a minor bump. It wouldn't work with my current version, but then I upgraded and other libraries started breaking because they woul…

Google uses Angular 2 extensively, just a lot of it is internal apps. From what I heard, there was a big push to typescript and angular 1.6 before switching to Angular. But Google fully uses Angular internally. Lots of large companies are using Angular in production. From my experience, lots of smaller startups and a couple big companies are using react, but lots of enterprise apps and many former anuglar 1.x apps ar…

Angular 2 is no more or less battle tested than React.
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