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How Redux Works: A Counter-Example

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Re: How Redux Works: A Counter-Example

#21

Post by dimillian »

leshow wrote: post #3
ergo14 wrote: post #2

It is interesting how people have the idea that react === Redux/flux. Where in fact Redux is unopinionated and works with other libraries/frameworks just fine.

How often do you see redux used with anything other than react? Or are you just talking about redux working with react alternatives like preact/inferno, etc? You're not wrong, but practically 99% of people pair it with react.

We use it in our native mobile applications (iOS / Android) for over a year now. It make a lot of sense, improved the codebase maintainability and reduced the number of bugs.

Re: How Redux Works: A Counter-Example

#22

Post by ashark »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #13
robmcm wrote: post #4

There is a certain paradox with teaching something like Redux, in that it's designed to make complex systems easy to understand and manageable. Yet when trying to demonstrate with a simple example, it appears hugely over complex and unnecessary. I think a pre-requisite to learning something like Redux (or any micro-architecture) is to first try building something without it. Once you understand the pains of undiscipl…

I think there's a fair criticism of Redux in here - most well designed tools can accomodate a learning curve, and scale up the complexity when needed. I can be productive in Express without knowing about middleware, or git without knowing how to rebase. Redux, on the other hand, expects you to dive into the deep end head first the first time you use it. I teach javascript development, and I'm noticing there's a prett…

It's downright embarrassing to walk through a Redux-using project with someone competent who's not immersed in the JS world. Source: had to do this recently. It helps if you translate "action creator", "action", and "reducer" to terms that are less misleading in the first two cases, and less uselessly-generic in the last one, but only a little.

I tolerate it for basically "no-one got fired for buying IBM" reasons, i.e. the devs I work with think it's good and it's better to have twice as many problems and none of them be my fault than half as many and all of them be my fault.

Re: How Redux Works: A Counter-Example

#25

Post by [deleted] »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #13
robmcm wrote: post #4

There is a certain paradox with teaching something like Redux, in that it's designed to make complex systems easy to understand and manageable. Yet when trying to demonstrate with a simple example, it appears hugely over complex and unnecessary. I think a pre-requisite to learning something like Redux (or any micro-architecture) is to first try building something without it. Once you understand the pains of undiscipl…

I think there's a fair criticism of Redux in here - most well designed tools can accomodate a learning curve, and scale up the complexity when needed. I can be productive in Express without knowing about middleware, or git without knowing how to rebase. Redux, on the other hand, expects you to dive into the deep end head first the first time you use it. I teach javascript development, and I'm noticing there's a prett…

[deleted]

Re: How Redux Works: A Counter-Example

#26

Post by irl_zebra »

robmcm wrote: post #4

There is a certain paradox with teaching something like Redux, in that it's designed to make complex systems easy to understand and manageable. Yet when trying to demonstrate with a simple example, it appears hugely over complex and unnecessary. I think a pre-requisite to learning something like Redux (or any micro-architecture) is to first try building something without it. Once you understand the pains of undiscipl…

I agree with this. I tried to learn React and Redux a while back, and didn't really grok it, so I built the React app without Redux. Ended up passing state up and down many, many layers of components and it got pretty hairy. So I added Redux to the mix and it was like a lightbulb went off in my head.

Re: How Redux Works: A Counter-Example

#27

Post by dceddia »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #13
robmcm wrote: post #4

There is a certain paradox with teaching something like Redux, in that it's designed to make complex systems easy to understand and manageable. Yet when trying to demonstrate with a simple example, it appears hugely over complex and unnecessary. I think a pre-requisite to learning something like Redux (or any micro-architecture) is to first try building something without it. Once you understand the pains of undiscipl…

I think there's a fair criticism of Redux in here - most well designed tools can accomodate a learning curve, and scale up the complexity when needed. I can be productive in Express without knowing about middleware, or git without knowing how to rebase. Redux, on the other hand, expects you to dive into the deep end head first the first time you use it. I teach javascript development, and I'm noticing there's a prett…

The Redux learning curve is tough, especially for folks who don't already have a strong grasp of functional programming ideas. Immutability is weird. Breaking everything up into multiple places (dispatch, actions, reducers) is weird. Like you say, it's unfortunate that one must basically learn _all of it_ to get started using Redux. It does do a nice job of solving difficult problems though.

> there needs to be some amount of consensus on what the best solution is.

The thing is, there is consensus: it's Redux. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but it's king of the state management hill right now.

What's really interesting to me is that the JS community is largely allergic to anything that isn't the "best solution". Nobody wants to use a little library with 53 stars on Github, even if it's easier, or seems like a better fit than Redux. The thinking seems to be "It's not any good unless it's the most popular choice." Those sorts of libraries might be ok for proof-of-concept work, but not for the real world. Not for production.

What drives this line of thinking? I think it's complex, but I believe fear plays a big role.

- Fear of choosing the wrong library (what if it becomes unpopular!)

- Fear in one's own abilities to evaluate a library ("it seems fine to me, but I'm no authority, I can't make that call")

- Fear of looking bad to the boss ("Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", right? React + Redux has that spot right now)

There's also the self-reinforcing nature of a popular thing: companies using Redux => job listings require Redux => people want to learn Redux => people make Redux courses/books/blogs => people don't teach the alternatives.

Re: How Redux Works: A Counter-Example

#28

Post by jedrek »

ccalvert wrote: post #16
ryanbrunner wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a fair criticism of Redux in here - most well designed tools can accomodate a learning curve, and scale up the complexity when needed. I can be productive in Express without knowing about middleware, or git without knowing how to rebase. Redux, on the other hand, expects you to dive into the deep end head first the first time you use it. I teach javascript development, and I'm noticing there's a prett…

I perhaps foolishly go ahead and teach React and Redux to my students. The first thing I show them, however, is this article by Dan Abramov, who you perhaps know from his conference videos or his amazing work fielding React bug reports. You might not need Redux: https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/you-might-not-need-redux-be4... The little example he provides is remarkably powerful and a great intro to thinking like a Re…

Abramov being one of the creators of Redux.

Re: How Redux Works: A Counter-Example

#29

Post by krishanath »

robmcm wrote: post #4

There is a certain paradox with teaching something like Redux, in that it's designed to make complex systems easy to understand and manageable. Yet when trying to demonstrate with a simple example, it appears hugely over complex and unnecessary. I think a pre-requisite to learning something like Redux (or any micro-architecture) is to first try building something without it. Once you understand the pains of undiscipl…

>> it appears hugely over complex and unnecessary

Which it is, actually!

Think about how MVC works in iOS, or ASP.NET MVC or JSP Model 2, etc. In the case of the latter two, your state is stored in the session as simple, regular objects. Have you felt the need for actions and reducers and immutability etc. when using session state? I have not.

When programming JavaScript SPA, you can program in the style of MVC also. There is no need for actions, reducers and so on, unless your app is for example a word processor and you need undo/redo (as mentioned by another comment on this thread.) Most of the time you are getting data from the backend, temporarily storing stuff in memory, modifying it and sending it back to the backend. There is no need for actions/reducers and such other nonsense for that.

When I mention this someone always points me to the "you may not need redux" article by the creator of redux, in an attempt to legitimize some use cases of redux. There may indeed be some legitimate uses cases for redux. But it has become the de facto standard way of building React applications, and that's totally unjustified.

Re: How Redux Works: A Counter-Example

#30

Post by evan_ »

kyberias wrote: post #24

What language is that in the examples? Yes, I've dropped out of the Javascript train.

It’s ES6 JavaScript, it’s great, and most modern browsers support it out of the box. You can also use Babel to transpire it into something that’s supported everywhere.
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