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GitHub Stars !== Usage: React Is Still Blowing Vue and Angular Away

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Re: GitHub Stars !== Usage: React Is Still Blowing Vue and Angular Away

#41

Not really big fan of articles like this. Why the need to compare and say this one has more stars, or is more used, etc. I am thankful that we have these frameworks / libraries / modules that have greatly helped in our software development process. At the end of the day, what matters is developer productivity, their happiness and satisfaction (regardless of the toolkit they use), and the overall value that their prod…

In general I agree with you, but our company is very "consistency" heavy. So someone high up has to make a decision: which framework to adopt, because once that decision is made, it's sticking for a long time.

And sadly I don't think developer happiness & satisfaction are real concerns for a company that knows how to make money.

Re: GitHub Stars !== Usage: React Is Still Blowing Vue and Angular Away

#42

Why do people care which framework "blows" the other one away? In my opinion, it literally doesn't matter at all and arguing over such things seems amateur. Use whatever tool gets the job done.

I agree. The use of "Blowing away" in the title is incendiary and unnecessary. It would be far better to state the metric they're using, i.e. "GitHub Stars !== Usage: React downloads still surpass Vue and Angular" It's taken React about 2-3 years to go from being head to head with Angular(JS) to being the dominant frontend ecosystem. I expect within 2-3 years Vue and React will be on far more equal footing in terms o…

> I expect within 2-3 years Vue and React will be on far more equal footing in terms of usage and jobs.

I don't think this is true, primarily because of the number of large companies getting behind React and contributing to the ecosystem. Also, the difference between Angular and React is much larger (IMO) than the difference between React and Vue, which means there is less incentive to move to Vue if you already know React because the latter is Good Enough™.

Re: GitHub Stars !== Usage: React Is Still Blowing Vue and Angular Away

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious how Vue users are getting by without Webpack / Parcel for Babel and maintaining 3rd party dependencies via NPM? Copying and pasting Vue components from Stack Overflow? That approach may be fine for small web pages, but for commercial applications, it's not a viable approach.

You don't need babel if you don't use jsx (which for vue is the default). I've personally only used vue the way you would use jquery. Adding a full webpack/babel/npm stack with a build step and all would be too much work; I barely understand what webpack is in the first place.

If you barely understand what Webpack is then you probably aren't in a good position to argue for or against it's usage. You do need Babel if you intend to use newer JavaScript features but still have to support older browsers or even many mobile browsers. If you're only writing with ES5 features then you don't need any transpilation but many people want to use the new features available in newer versions of JavaScript/ECMAScript.

Webpack is great for, among other things, combining your code into single packages instead of including many script tags. It's also useful for optimizing the output of your build in various ways which makes it very valuable for large-scale applications.

Re: GitHub Stars !== Usage: React Is Still Blowing Vue and Angular Away

#45
No one I work with has ever even brought up the possibility of switching from React to Vue, let alone counting Github stars.

Compare to when React came out, it was immediate consensus that we need to switch from Backbone to React. When Angular gained popularity, we did not have an urge to switch because it felt unclear what the scope and direction of Angular actually was.

React (really JSX) solves the single problem of making HTML a part of JavaScript. For me, it's game over, they have solved the problem or came close enough to where I'm comfortable staying in the React ecosystem for the rest of my career.

With React there's no weird "v-if ng-if" template logic that you have to grapple with. To me, Handlebars already gave me enough taste of how horrible and limiting maintaining template logic outside of components is.

Just my take. No desire to even download Vue and try it out, I don't foresee any productivity gains from it.

Re: GitHub Stars !== Usage: React Is Still Blowing Vue and Angular Away

#46

Not really big fan of articles like this. Why the need to compare and say this one has more stars, or is more used, etc. I am thankful that we have these frameworks / libraries / modules that have greatly helped in our software development process. At the end of the day, what matters is developer productivity, their happiness and satisfaction (regardless of the toolkit they use), and the overall value that their prod…

It's a reasonable expectation that a framework with more users will have more documentation, more examples, more contributions from the community, etc. While I agree that a developer should choose based on what will make them most productive and happy, popularity is still an important factor.

When comparing 2 or more frameworks or libraries to use, I always check out the github repo and look at the number of stars. I don't see a problem with this article pointing out that this metric may not be the best indicator of usage.

Re: GitHub Stars !== Usage: React Is Still Blowing Vue and Angular Away

#48
post #14

Appreciate !== vs !=, no type conversion on Stars and Usage in comparison. Also, agreed. Would be more interesting to crawl all repos to see which have React vs Vue vs Angular for a more detailed understanding of usage.

Except most professional projects would be private or on GitHub Enterprise so even that metric would have some severe selection bias.

Good point. I guess we'd have to rely on Github publishing this data to get the full picture.

Re: GitHub Stars !== Usage: React Is Still Blowing Vue and Angular Away

#49
Vue, React and Angular (and many other frameworks) have enough critical mass that they aren't going away, and will continue to get regular updates. This, combined with how well the framework fits your particular use case and team, is all that matters. Why we focus on which one is "biggest" is beyond me. Biggest doesn't matter. Big enough does. Once a framework achieves that size, it can be considered for things other than personal toy projects, and all the other factors are what should guide your final decision.

Re: GitHub Stars !== Usage: React Is Still Blowing Vue and Angular Away

#50
post #13
post #6

People have wildly different views on what Github stars are. Some see it as a way to bookmark project you find interesting while other simply stars whenever they feel like the project is impressive. Bottomline is: it's not a good metric, it's simply a way to see how "popular" something is and how likely it is that some random developer saw your project. While anecdotal, I've starred Vue because I see it as a cool pro…

Also having created, promoted, and contributed to repositories with >100 stars it seems that ~10% of people who view the repository will star it. Not sure how reliable it is but I've always taken stars to indicate how many people have seen the project.

I have a couple projects that are getting a decent amount of stars recently and I'm looking at the stats for the last two weeks:

- One has 3750 unique visitors, and 680 stars in 2 weeks

- Another has 80 unique visitors, 20 stars in 2 weeks

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