The React Is “just” JavaScript Myth

> React is so much more than “just JavaScript”. React is an ecosystem. I feel like it’s a disservice to anyone trying to learn to diminish all that React entails. React shows up on the scene with Babel, Webpack, and JSX (which each have their own learning curve) then quickly branches out into technologies like Redux, React-Router, Immutable.js, Axios, Jest, Next.js, Create-React-App, GraphQL, and whatever weird plugin you need for your app.

> In my experience, there’s no casual mode within React. You need to be all-in, keeping up with the ecosystem, or else your knowledge evaporates.

This is not true at all. I use React for work and for pet projects, and I don't use or know what most of these libraries do. (We do use Redux).

It's easy to get caught up in library mania and chase after the newest javascript fads, but it is not necessary to build products.

Also, GraphQL is not tied to React or Javascript.

Having an ecosystem does not, in my humble opinion, make writing a React application feel substantively different from writing a pure JS application.

Yes, JSX is not part of the core language (yet), but it's the closest to pure JS we are going to get considering developers' need for an intuitive, expressive, and virtually bulletproof templating language.

Before learning React, I built some decent-sized applications with Ember and Emblem (a whitespace-significant language that compiles to Handlebars) and it was utterly painful. Not wanting to deal with Handlebars' proprietary, Ruby-like syntax (not bad per se--Ruby is really cool--but out-of-place in a JS application) and its artificial limitations on what you can do with the language (anything resembling display logic has to be extracted into special helper functions) is probably the single biggest reason I ultimately came to prefer React over Ember, despite Ember having some conveniences React didn't and still doesn't (such as a concrete modeling and persistence layer like Ember Data).

With that aside, I think React is the closest we can get to "just JS" without abandoning pragmatism.

Transpilers and build systems are a necessity when the language itself is changing at such a rapid pace and there are so many different environmental concerns an application needs to satisfy.

Just out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on Vue? I've heard a lot of good things about it.

I dislike the templating language, preferring jsx which is mostly standard js syntax, e.g.:

Vue: {{i}}

React: items.map((i) => {i})

The jQuery api was hundreds of different methods, the best of which are now available natively in JavaScript.

React has a very small api, I hardly ever refer to the documentation (unlike when I was a jQuery or Angular developer)

I agree that people reach too early for helper libraries but you can go a long way in pure React.